Opportunities and Challenges with Data Standardization, Management, and Sharing to Maximize Value of Offshore Wind Environmental Studies and Monitoring

Presentation Description: Offshore wind environmental monitoring creates a valuable opportunity for collecting regional datasets and informing adaptive management and a better understanding of ecosystems. As offshore wind has begun to progress on the US East Coast, challenges have arisen in environmental data standardization, management, and sharing. Factors such as proprietary information, publication-related delays, lack of planning for formatting and sharing, and ambiguity in where and how to house data pose challenges, but there are opportunities to optimize the pathways to data sharing and regionalize data collection efforts into both archival and real-time information for refined and broad studies. Data are being used across studies to inform modeling and reduce uncertainty and risk. Transparent data collection and sharing procedures provide an opportunity for industry to proactively engage in environmental stewardship. This panel will present lessons learned from early collaborations, experience from data collection by the geophysical industry, large-scale modeling for aquaculture and offshore wind, national bird tracking studies, and efforts underway to develop recommendations for data sharing. We will also discuss how big data across large regions can be applied to large-scale studies. Panelists: Sarah Courbis (Advisian - moderator), Alex Loureiro (EnerGeo Alliance), James Morris (NOAA), Nick Sisson (NMFS), Pam Loring (USFWS), and Kate Williams (Biodiversity Research Institute).