Synthesizing & sharing ocean data

Kaitlyn Raffier is a rising senior at the University of Maine. She is completing a Bachelors of Science in Ecology and Environmental Science with a concentration in sustainability, environmental policy and natural resource management and also a Bachelors of Arts in Economics. For her internship at the DMC in Summer 2018, she developed a framework to gather metadata (a.k.a. data about data) related to the environmental and human dimensions of Maine’s ocean.

Through interviews with experts at University of Maine Darling Marine Center (DMC) and other institutions, she gained a clearer picture of the data that have been generated at the DMC and the tools needed to develop a data management and sharing plan for the DMC and Maine ocean-related data more broadly.

Kaitlyn’s work contributed to the NOAA-funded project on Coastal Community Resilience that Heather leads, together with Joshua Stoll of UMaine School of Marine Sciences and Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries. 

We thank the Sustainable Ecological Aquaculture Network (SeaNET), the Research Reinvestment Fund (RRF), the Maine Economic Improvement Fund (MEIF), and the DMC for supporting SEA Fellows and making this project possible. KR also acknowledges the scientists and data managers who offered tremendous insight on the world of data management.

To learn more about Katie’s project, check out the poster she presented at the 2018 SEA Fellows Summer Science Symposium.

Would you like to get involved in the DMC’s project to develop a data capture & sharing platform for Maine ocean data? If so, please answer this short survey or contact Heather.Leslie@maine.edu