An official website of the United States government
Capacity sharing in the ocean sciences is essential for addressing pressing environmental challenges and fostering sustainable stewardship of marine ecosystems. This article focuses on three important capacity-sharing programs operating in Africa: Early Career Ocean Professionals (ECOP) Africa, Citizen Observation of Local Litter in Coastal Ecosystems (COLLECT) (a project of the Partnership for Observation of the Global Ocean), and Mundus Maris Africa. ECOP Africa, a pioneering platform for early career ocean professionals, emphasizes mentorship, training, and knowledge exchange to empower young marine scientists across the continent. Through dynamic programs and events, ECOP Africa is catalyzing interdisciplinary collaboration and inspiring the next generation of ocean leaders. Similarly, COLLECT leverages citizen science to tackle plastic pollution in coastal environments. By training secondary school students as “citizen scientists,” COLLECT has not only generated critical data on the distribution and abundance of coastal debris but also fostered environmental awareness and local engagement. These initiatives demonstrate the power of inclusive, community-driven approaches to capacity sharing in the ocean sciences. They highlight the transformative potential of combining open science, education, and international collaboration to address global challenges such as plastic pollution and climate change while empowering local communities to take active roles in preserving their marine environments.
more »
« less
This content will become publicly available on January 1, 2026
Capacity Building with Volunteers: Divers and Boaters Collect Data on Southern California Bight
“The science we need for the ocean we want” (IOC, 2020) may be more science than we can afford unless we devise additional cost-effective ways to produce it. Much of the science we need may require local knowledge and skills that are difficult to generate at scale. Global problems, such as ocean acidification, may be lessened by using site-specific solutions that require knowledge of local oceanography. Similarly, implementing solutions to local problems, such as pollution and fisheries sustainability, will require local knowledge and skills that cannot immediately be drawn from global capacity. Supplying the know-how for inexpensive staff and scientific gear to achieve these solutions may be part of capacity building and sharing in the UN Ocean Decade.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2318309
- PAR ID:
- 10599690
- Publisher / Repository:
- The Oceanography Society
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Oceanography
- ISSN:
- 1042-8275
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Why is engineering design important for all leaners? Engineering design systematically identifies needs, wants, and problems and then devises solutions to address them. A central component of our work is guiding students in the engineered design of solutions to local environmental problems. Science in society and schools must be for all citizens. Reasons include the desire to prepare citizens with the tools and knowledge to address local and global problems. With funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation, we foster sustained learning of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) for students from primary school through university.more » « less
-
Recent trends in the cybersecurity workforce have recognized that effective solutions for complex problems require collective efforts from individuals with diverse sets of knowledge, skills, and abilities. Therefore, the growing need to train students in team collaboration skills propelled educators in computer science and engineering to adopt team-based pedagogical strategies. Team-based pedagogy has shown success in enhancing students' knowledge in course subjects and their motivation in learning. However, it is limited in offering concrete frameworks specifically focusing on how to teach team collaboration skills. As part of an interdisciplinary effort, we draw on Transactive Memory Systems Theory-a communication theory that explains how individuals in groups learn who knows what and organize who does what-in developing a Team Knowledge Sharing Assignment as a tool for student teams to structure their team collaboration processes. This paper reports a result of a case study in designing and facilitating the assignment for cybersecurity students enrolled in a scholarship program. Students' evaluations and the instructor's assessment reveal that the assignment made a positive impact on students' team collaboration skills by helping them successfully identify their team members' expertise and capitalize on their team's knowledge resources when delegating functional roles. Based on this case study, we offer practical suggestions on how the assignment could be used for various classes or cybersecurity projects and how instructors could maximize its benefits.more » « less
-
Contemporary views on what students should learn increasingly emphasize that students need to acquire more than a base of knowledge; they need to acquire the skills and abilities to use such knowledge in dynamic and flexible ways. To be most effective, learning environments need assessments that are aligned to these perspectives. Using a principled design framework can help guide assessment development toward such targets. Even when using a framework, however, thorny design challenges may arise. Technology-enhanced assessments offer opportunities to overcome such challenges but are not a solution in and of themselves and can also introduce new challenges. In this paper, we describe three challenges (conflict between multiple dimensions of science proficiency, authentic data, and grade-appropriate graphing tools) that we faced when designing for a specific Next Generation Science Standard, and the theoretical and design principles that guided us as we ideated design solutions. Through these designs we maintained alignment to our multidimensional assessment targets, a critical component of our larger assessment validity argument.more » « less
-
The strengthening and enhancement of capacity are stated goals of several international ocean law and policy instruments that focus on biodiversity conservation, fisheries management, sustainable development, pollution, mineral extraction, traditional knowledge, and ocean science. Yet, achieving these goals has proved elusive, as illustrated by persisting divides in capacity and technology (Amon et al., 2022a; Bell et al., 2023). This has led to the emergence of new terminology, such as capacity sharing, which reflects the need for evolving practices away from unidirectional approaches and toward equitable partnerships (Harden-Davies et al., 2022) that recognize the value of existing knowledge (scientific or not), as well as practices and values held by a community (Spalding et al., 2023).more » « less
