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The capacity sharing approach of the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR) focuses on supporting opportunities for individual ocean scientists and students within SCOR’s portfolio of scientific activities and through targeted capacity development opportunities (Morrison et al., 2013; Urban and Seeyave, 2021; Miloslavich et al., 2022; Seeyave et al., 2025, in this issue). This article focuses on SCOR’s travel grant program that supports the attendance of early career researchers (ECRs) from developing countries at scientific events (see https://scor-int.org/work/capacity/travel-grants/ for a description and application). 

The Partnership for Observation of the Global Ocean (POGO) and the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR) have been running a Visiting Fellowship program in ocean observations that has trained 200 fellows since its inception in 2001. We report here on the medium- and long-term impacts of the training, as demonstrated by a combination of quantitative results from evaluation questionnaires and qualitative reports from fellows and supervisors. The key findings are that the fellowships have had positive impacts on the fellows themselves (e.g., participation in new research projects, implementation of new techniques, long-term collaborations), as well as “training the trainers,” with most fellows indicating that they had passed on the knowledge gained. Benefits to the host supervisor and institution are also apparent through continued collaborations (e.g., reciprocal exchange visits, joint publications, joint projects). More widespread impacts are evident, where fellows have become key participants in the international scientific community. 

Aquatic environments encompass the world’s most extensive habitats, rich with sounds produced by a diversity of animals. Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) is an increasingly accessible remote sensing technology that uses hydrophones to listen to the underwater world and represents an unprecedented, non-invasive method to monitor underwater environments. This information can assist in the delineation of biologically important areas via detection of sound-producing species or characterization of ecosystem type and condition, inferred from the acoustic properties of the local soundscape. At a time when worldwide biodiversity is in significant decline and underwater soundscapes are being altered as a result of anthropogenic impacts, there is a need to document, quantify, and understand biotic sound sources–potentially before they disappear. A significant step toward these goals is the development of a web-based, open-access platform that provides: (1) a reference library of known and unknown biological sound sources (by integrating and expanding existing libraries around the world); (2) a data repository portal for annotated and unannotated audio recordings of single sources and of soundscapes; (3) a training platform for artificial intelligence algorithms for signal detection and classification; and (4) a citizen science-based application for public users. Although individually, these resources are often met on regional and taxa-specific scales, many are not sustained and, collectively, an enduring global database with an integrated platform has not been realized. We discuss the benefits such a program can provide, previous calls for global data-sharing and reference libraries, and the challenges that need to be overcome to bring together bio- and ecoacousticians, bioinformaticians, propagation experts, web engineers, and signal processing specialists (e.g., artificial intelligence) with the necessary support and funding to build a sustainable and scalable platform that could address the needs of all contributors and stakeholders into the future.