The first tranches of data have been added by stakeholders to Marine Recorder Online (MRO), the UK database focused on marine biodiversity and associated benthic sampling developed and built by Ocean Ecology’s Data Solutions team for a group of leading conservation organisations.
The online data management system was designed to replace Marine Recorder, a desktop-based system built in the early 2000s for use by the UK’s statutory nature conservation bodies and other marine conservation organisations.
The original desktop-based Marine Recorder was only updated every six months with fresh data from contributors across the UK. But the rapidly increasing volume of information and the need for it to be more contemporaneous meant a new system was required.
MRO, however, will automatically collate data, provide more consistency and enable interoperability while improving access and archiving to key biodiversity databases where data are made public. The custodians of the data are: Centre for Environmental Data and Recording (CEDaR); Dorset Wildlife Trust; Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA); Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC); Marine Biological Association (MBA); Seasearch (Marine Conservation Society); Natural England; Natural Resources Wales (NRW); NatureScot and Porcupine Marine Natural History Society.
Ocean Ecology’s Data Solutions team began working on the system in 2021. Initially, only the custodians of the system or other authorised users will be able to use it while remaining data from the legacy system are migrated across. However, the data will automatically be sent to DASSH, a data centre within the Marine Environmental Data and Information Network (MEDIN), where it will be made publicly available.
Head of Data Solutions Elliot Carter said: “It has been one of the largest and most interesting projects our team has ever worked on. We have been delighted to bring our experience in software development and marine data management together to support this project. Completing the migration of the first full legacy dataset into the new system is an important milestone in the redevelopment of MRO for a modern age and we are excited to reach this point and look forward to opening up the system for wider use in the near future as more data is migrated.”
Further development work on the new system is already under way and new features will be introduced while the remaining data from the other custodian organisations are being migrated.
The MRO development in numbers
- Up to the point of the first legacy data migration, the project had required around 13,700 hours of work or more than 1,800 working days.
- Data will come from 10 different organisations with data sets spanning the entire coastline of the UK.
- More than 4,000 surveys, 300,000+ samples, 300,000+ biotope records and 4,000,000+ species records will make up the legacy data.
- Altogether, this amounts to 10s of millions of records and more than half a billion data points. And fresh data will continually be added to MRO, adding to our growing understanding of the UK’s marine environment.
