Scottish Marine Protected Areas (MPA) monitoring strategy: supporting annexes 1 to 6

Annex 6: Data management

Data collected as part of the Scottish MPA Monitoring Strategy will be managed in accordance with existing Marine Environmental Data Information Network (MEDIN) standards and practices in use for marine monitoring data.

The approach adopted here also complies with Scottish Government Information Management Principles^[66] and the Data Vision for Scotland^[67]. Each competent monitoring authority will follow their own organisations data management strategies and plans.

These are outlined in more detail following the key steps in the “Data Management Lifecycle” of Acquire, Organise, Use, Share and Maintain (adapted from IOC Manuals and Guides No. 73. 2016. Guidelines for a data management plan^[68]).

Acquire

Data acquisition will follow Standard Operating Procedures where available, and where such do not exist they will be created to allow consistent procedures to be followed. Quality Assurance Procedures (QA) will be applied to monitoring methods and where available external quality assurance schemes will be implemented to ensure inter-comparability between organisations and operators. These are available from international organisations such as BEQUALM^[69] and in the UK the National Marine Biological Analytical Quality Assurance Quality Control Scheme (NMBAQC^[70]). Currently, external Quality Assurance is available for several strands of sample collection and analysis, but others are lacking and efforts will be made to fill these gaps (e.g. the potential development of external QA of underwater video collection and analysis under NMBAQC).

Organise

Data will be collated alongside explanatory metadata in accordance with MEDIN metadata discovery standard for individual datasets:

http://www.oceannet.org/marine_data_standards/documents/medin_schema_doc_2_3_8.pdf

Use

Each organisation will apply its on Standard Operating Procedures for use and interpretation of monitoring data, making use of MEDIN standards (compliant discovery metadata and MEDIN Data Guidelines)^[71] where appropriate.

Share

Specific monitoring reports will be published and made available by each competent monitoring authority on their own public facing web pages. Marine monitoring programmes metadata will be submitted to UKDMOS^[72]. In accordance with the Scottish Government Open data Strategy^[73] and INSPIRE legislation^[74] and Scottish legislation^[75] processed and collated monitoring data will also be made available on open data portals including Marine Scotland Information (MSI)^[76], Scottish Natural Heritage interactive (SNHi)^[77] and EMODNet seabed habitats portal^[78] and relevant MEDIN DACs with feature records also being submitted to the National Biodiversity Network (NBN) Atlas Scotland^[79] for collation and public access.

Maintain

Long-term data storage and archiving of MPA monitoring data will make use of the relevant Data Archive Centres^[80] (DACs) associated with MEDIN, in particular the Data Archive on Seabed Species and Habitats (DASSH), the Data Archive Centre for geology, geophysics and backscatter (BGS)^[81]. Marine bird’s data will be archived in the databases administered by JNCC. Where possible and appropriate data will be formally published using the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) portal to allow use and citation of the data underlying assessments.