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Ocean ecosystems are in decline, yet we also have more ocean data, and more data portals, than ever before. To make effective decisions regarding ocean management, especially in the face of global environmental change, we need to make the best use possible of these data. Yet many data are not shared, are hard to find, and cannot be effectively accessed. We identify three classes of challenges to data sharing and use: uploading, aggregating, and navigating. While tremendous advances have occurred to improve ocean data operability and transparency, the effect has been largely incremental. We propose a suite of both technical and cultural solutions to overcome these challenges including the use of natural language processing, automatic data translation, ledger-based data identifiers, digital community currencies, data impact factors, and social networks as ways of breaking through these barriers. One way to harness these solutions could be a combinatorial machine that embodies both technological and social networking solutions to aggregate ocean data and to allow researchers to discover, navigate, and download data as well as to connect researchers and data users while providing an open-sourced backend for new data tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing the size and number of marine protected areas (MPAs) is widely seen as a way to meet ambitious biodiversity and sustainable development goals. Yet, debate still exists on the effectiveness of MPAs in achieving ecological and societal objectives. Although the literature provides significant evidence of the ecological effects of MPAs within their boundaries, much remains to be learned about the ecological and social effects of MPAs on regional and seascape scales. Key to improving the effectiveness of MPAs, and ensuring that they achieve desired outcomes, will be better monitoring that includes ecological and social data collected inside and outside of MPAs. This can lead to more conclusive evidence about what is working, what is not, and why. Eight authors were asked to write about their experiences with MPA effectiveness. The authors were instructed to clearly define "effectiveness" and discuss the degree to which they felt MPAs had achieved or failed to be effective. Essays were exchanged among authors and each was invited to write a shorter "counterpoint." The exercise shows that, while experiences are diverse, many authors found common ground regarding the role of MPAs in achieving conservation targets. This exchange of perspectives is intended to promote reflection, analysis, and dialogue as a means for improving MPA design, assessment, and integration with other conservation tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]