Identifying community practices in marine benthic data usage in Florida

A significant proportion of Florida's population lives on the coast and is directly impacted by alterations to the coastal zone, weather disasters (e.g., hurricanes, erosion, flooding), or changes to ecosystem services. Data collected in Florida waters (including water quality, habitat health, bathymetry, and fisheries data) are important for the maintenance of coastal waters, communities, and ecosystems. Yet benthic data collected by a variety of stakeholders are often not shared or openly available, with little metadata to ease data reuse, and are often stored in incompatible formats. To assess the needs of government agencies, private companies, academic researchers, and data managers, we conducted a survey and organized an expert focus group to determine the current state of coastal and marine data usage and distribution in Florida. Through the survey, we asked participants to describe the types of data they use or collect, how they use that data, what limitations they encounter with data sharing, how and when they share their data, and what sorts of metadata standards they use in their work. We determined that many data producers and users are unaware of data standards and often do not follow best management practices for data collection and sharing. The sector of activity of the individual respondent (government, academic, non-profit) determined how data users were interacting with or collecting data and what standards they followed when sharing data. Our expert panel largely echoed our findings, with consistent, well-documented, and standardized datasets being the most important components for data integration in projects. To advance accessibility and reusability of benthic data, our project highlights the need for additional training of stakeholders on data standardization, collaboration and integration, which needs to be applied across institutions. A major need that was identified is tools that make data sharing and metadata creation easier and more efficient.