Julia S. Stewart Lowndes

Proprietary development solutions are often perceived as being delivered more quickly and easily than open methods, fueling the misconception that they inherently produce better overall outcomes. However, we argue that open development practices can lead to both efficient and maximally impactful outcomes. One successful strategy for accelerating open approaches in the geosciences is co‐creation, a model that emphasizes shared ownership between developers and users. This approach creates a collaborative flywheel dynamic—pioneered in the geosciences by the Pangeo project—that encourages teamwork, standardizes access to shared infrastructure, and facilitates iterations of stakeholder feedback and development to accelerate solution finding.

As netCDF (Network Common Data Form) files are widely used in Earth science — with climate models, oceanographic or atmospheric reanalyses, and observational data — improved means of evaluating netCDF files can help enable a wide range of applications. We have developed a reusable open source approach through ncompare, which is a Python package for comparing netCDF structures. ncompare facilitates rapid comparisons by generating a formatted display of the matching and non-matching groups, variables, and associated metadata between two NetCDF datasets. The user has the option to colorize the terminal output for ease of viewing, and ncompare can optionally save comparison reports in text, comma-separated value (CSV), and/or Microsoft Excel formats.

To address our climate emergency, “we must rapidly, radically reshape society”—Johnson & Wilkinson, All We Can Save. In science, reshaping requires formidable technical (cloud, coding, reproducibility) and cultural shifts (mindsets, hybrid collaboration, inclusion). We are a group of cross‐government and academic scientists that are exploring better ways of working and not being too entrenched in our bureaucracies to do better science, support colleagues, and change the culture at our organizations. We share much‐needed success stories and action for what we can all do to reshape science as part of the Open Science movement and 2023 Year of Open Science.

Improving the health of coastal and open sea marine ecosystems represents a substantial challenge for sustainable marine resource management, since it requires balancing human benefits and impacts on the ocean. This challenge is often exacerbated by incomplete knowledge and lack of tools that measure ocean and coastal ecosystem health in a way that allows consistent monitoring of progress towards predefined management targets. The lack of such tools often limits capabilities to enact and enforce effective governance. We introduce the Baltic Health Index (BHI) as a transparent, collaborative and repeatable assessment tool. The Index complements existing, more ecological‐oriented, approaches by including a human dimension on the status of the Baltic Sea, an ecosystem impacted by multiple anthropogenic pressures and governed by a multitude of comprehensive national and international policies. Using a large amount of social–ecological data available, we assessed the health of the Baltic Sea for nine goals that represent the status towards set targets, for example, clean waters, biodiversity, food provision, natural products extraction and tourism. Our results indicate that the overall health of the Baltic Sea is suboptimal (a score of 76 out of 100), and a substantial effort is required to reach the management objectives and associated targets. Subregionally, the lowest BHI scores were measured for carbon storage, contaminants and lasting special places (i.e. marine protected areas), albeit with large spatial variation. Overall, the likely future status of all goals in the BHI averaged for the entire Baltic Sea is better than the present status, indicating a positive trend towards a healthier Baltic Sea. However, in some Baltic Sea basins, the trend for specific goals was decreasing, highlighting locations and issues that should be the focus of management priorities. The BHI outcomes can be used to identify both pan‐Baltic and subregional scale management priorities and to illustrate the interconnectedness between goals linked by cumulative pressures. Hence, the information provided by the BHI tool and its further development will contribute towards the fulfilment of the UN Agenda 2030 and its Sustainability Development Goals. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

Humans interact with the oceans in diverse and profound ways. The scope, magnitude, footprint and ultimate cumulative impacts of human activities can threaten ocean ecosystems and have changed over time, resulting in new challenges and threats to marine ecosystems. A fundamental gap in understanding how humanity is affecting the oceans is our limited knowledge about the pace of change in cumulative impact on ocean ecosystems from expanding human activities – and the patterns, locations and drivers of most significant change. To help address this, we combined high resolution, annual data on the intensity of 14 human stressors and their impact on 21 marine ecosystems over 11 years (2003–2013) to assess pace of change in cumulative impacts on global oceans, where and how much that pace differs across the ocean, and which stressors and their impacts contribute most to those changes. We found that most of the ocean (59%) is experiencing significantly increasing cumulative impact, in particular due to climate change but also from fishing, land-based pollution and shipping. Nearly all countries saw increases in cumulative impacts in their coastal waters, as did all ecosystems, with coral reefs, seagrasses and mangroves at most risk. Mitigation of stressors most contributing to increases in overall cumulative impacts is urgently needed to sustain healthy oceans.

Some societies have sustainably managed their local marine resources for centuries using traditional methods, but we are only beginning to learn how to do it at larger scales, including globally. A broad, deep and constantly growing body of ocean knowledge has developed, adding many new concepts, perspectives, management models and analytical tools into the knowledge base in a relatively short period. Such rapid growth has created a potentially confusing mash-up of ideas, acronyms, techniques, tools and regulations, demonstrated by recent titles such as, ‘Marine planning: tragedy of the acronyms’ (Ardron 2010), ‘Integrated marine science and management: wading through the morass’ (Elliott 2014), ‘Beyond rhetoric: navigating the conceptual tangle towards effective implementation of the ecosystem approach to oceans management ‘ (Engler 2015) and ‘Marine legislation – the ultimate ‘horrendogram’’ (Boyes and Elliott 2014, undated and 2016).The purpose of this paper is to assist policy makers, marine managers and those considering careers in this area by providing a short history of ocean management, its conceptual foundation, frameworks for modern management and examples of its application at different scales. Extensive literature exists to supplement the summarized information we present.We highlight the following terms as navigational markers through the ‘seascape’1 of marine management rhetoric: sustainability, ecosystem approach, ecosystem-based management, natural capital, ecosystem services, integrated ecosystem assessment, the causal framework DPSIR (Drivers, Pressures, States, Impacts, Responses) and its variants, indicators and reference points, marine area planning, marine spatial management (including decision support tools), adaptive ocean management and dynamic ocean management. We also point out the important roles of marine initiatives such as Blue Economy, the Ocean Health Index, Large Marine Ecosystems, Seascapes, Protected Areas and others. Understanding the similarities, differences, relationships and synergies among these activities increases the likelihood of achieving successful management processes or solutions.Further knowledge and additional methods are still needed to safeguard the human-ocean system and the benefits it provides to people particularly with continued global population growth, but better awareness of what we already know will speed collective progress toward healthier oceans and coastlines. Working toward that goal can also be a uniting force in an increasingly divisive world, because it must necessarily breach political, geographic, economic and other differences.

Reproducibility has long been a tenet of science but has been challenging to achieve—we learned this the hard way when our old approaches proved inadequate to efficiently reproduce our own work. Here we describe how several free software tools have fundamentally upgraded our approach to collaborative research, making our entire workflow more transparent and streamlined. By describing specific tools and how we incrementally began using them for the Ocean Health Index project, we hope to encourage others in the scientific community to do the same—so we can all produce better science in less time.

Marine policy is increasingly calling for maintaining or restoring healthy oceans while human activities continue to intensify. Thus, successful prioritization and management of competing objectives requires a comprehensive assessment of the current state of the ocean. Unfortunately, assessment frameworks to define and quantify current ocean state are often site-specific, limited to a few ocean components, and difficult to reproduce in different geographies or even through time, limiting spatial or temporal comparisons as well as the potential for shared learning. Ideally, frameworks should be tailorable to accommodate use in disparate locations and contexts, removing the need to develop frameworks de novo and allowing efforts to focus on the assessments themselves to advise action. Here, we present some of our experiences using the Ocean Health Index (OHI) framework, a tailorable and repeatable approach that measures health of coupled human-ocean ecosystems in different contexts by accommodating differences in local environmental characteristics, cultural priorities, and information availability and quality. Since its development in 2012, eleven assessments using the OHI framework have been completed at global, national, and regional scales, four of which have been led by independent academic or government groups. We have found the following to be best practices for conducting assessments: Incorporate key characteristics and priorities into the assessment framework design before gathering information; Strategically define spatial boundaries to balance information availability and decision-making scales; Maintain the key characteristics and priorities of the assessment framework regardless of information limitations; and Document and share the assessment process, methods, and tools. These best practices are relevant to most ecosystem assessment processes, but also provide tangible guidance for assessments using the OHI framework. These recommendations also promote transparency around which decisions were made and why, reproducibility through access to detailed methods and computational code, repeatability via the ability to modify methods and computational code, and ease of communication to wide audiences, all of which are critical for any robust assessment process.