The primary aim of the Fisheries and Resources Monitoring System (FIRMS) is to provide access to a wide range of high-quality information on the global monitoring and management of fishery marine resources. FIRMS draws together a unified partnership of international organizations, regional fishery bodies and, in the future, national scientific institutes, collaborating within formal agreement to report and share information on fisheries resources. For effective fisheries information management, FIRMS also participates in the development and promotion of agreed standards. FIRMS system is part of the Fisheries Global Information System (FIGIS). Information provided by the partners is organized in a database and published in the form of fact sheets. This system provides the data owner with tools to ensure controlled dissemination of high quality and updated information.

Seabed Habitats was one of seven themes of the European Marine Observation and Data Network (EMODnet) initiative, funded by the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund. Since its inception in 2009, EMODnet Seabed Habitats developed, improved and gradually increased the coverage of a broad-scale seabed habitat map for Europe's seabed, also known as EUSeaMap. In addition, EMODnet Seabed Habitats continued the work started by MESH and MESH Atlantic projects in collating and making available seabed habitat maps from surveys, through the EMODnet Seabed Habitats map viewer. In it's third Phase (2017-2019), EMODnet Seabed Habitats collated and provided habitat point data and the outputs of habitat distribution modelling, and the third phase has now been extended to 2021. The extended third phase of the project will: - Continue to grow Europe's only comprehensive library of habitat maps from surveys and collection of survey sample points - Create new composite data products to add to those for the Essential Ocean Variable habitats and OSPAR threatened and/or declining habitats - Update the EMODnet broad-scale seabed habitat map for Europe (EUSeaMap) using the next seabed substrate update from EMODnet Geology - Update web content with extra resources for habitat mapping, including a catalogue highlighting all the most useful data products

Stakeholder networks from 32 countries united to collaborate on Ocean Action, Climate Action, addressing pollution from land-based, riverine and marine-based sources and advancing Circular Economy development. International Waste Platform provides international expertise and launches joint initiatives; It supports advancing solutions to mitigate the global waste, plastic pollution & climate crises which are interlinked. Representatives committed themselves to align objectives, to support the implementation of strategies of Ocean Action and Climate Action, as well as to share ideas, best practices, concepts, programs, knowledge and opportunities; including the reduction of plastic debris at the source, before it enters rivers and the coastal environment. Country / regional networks and national marine debris networks make a difference in societal behaviour change and environmental policies by providing input and promoting action which aims at finding solutions to reduce (ocean) plastic pollution. Country and regional networks are instrumental to reach the prevention and reduction of marine pollution, facilitate and foster the establishment of national and international partnerships in a multi-stakeholder approach.

Built and developed by researchers, to ensure that everyone can join in Open Science. The OpenAIRE project, in the vanguard of the open access and open data movements in Europe was commissioned by the EC to support their nascent Open Data policy by providing a catch-all repository for EC funded research. CERN, an OpenAIRE partner and pioneer in open source, open access and open data, provided this capability and Zenodo was launched in May 2013. In support of its research programme CERN has developed tools for Big Data management and extended Digital Library capabilities for Open Data. Through Zenodo these Big Science tools could be effectively shared with the long­-tail of research. Zenodo helps researchers receive credit by making the research results citable and through OpenAIRE integrates them into existing reporting lines to funding agencies like the European Commission. Citation information is also passed to DataCite and onto the scholarly aggregators.

The Ocean Action Hub is an open, interactive website providing information and promoting action globally to support the implementation of SDG 14: Life below Water before 2030. The Hub was initiated by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), in partnership with the Governments of Sweden and Fiji, to facilitate multistakeholder engagement as part of the Ocean Conference process. The Hub hosted online discussions on ocean issues as an input into the development of the 1st Ocean Conference "Call for Action" in 2017, and facilitated co-development of solutions and voluntary commitments by multi-stakeholders, as well as providing a space for connecting and sharing ideas. In the run-up to the 2nd Ocean Conference the Hub continues to be maintained as a central source for information on implementation of SDG 14. The ocean plays a key role in the achievement of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The ocean covers nearly three quarters of the Earth’s surface and contributes substantially to human development, including to the provision of food security, transport, energy supply, tourism and many of the planet’s most critical ecosystem services (carbon and nutrient cycling, climate regulation, oxygen production). The market value of marine and coastal resources and industries is approximately USD 3 trillion per year, or 5 percent of global GDP. Yet, today it is estimated that 40 per cent of our oceans are heavily affected by unsustainable practices, including over-fishing, land-based sources of pollution, habitat destruction, invasive species and climate change, particularly ocean acidification. SDG 14: Life below Water aims to address these threats.

NASA's Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC) is located at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. PO.DAAC manages and provides tools and services for NASA's oceanographic and hydrologic data (satellite, airborne, and in-situ) to enable a greater understanding of the physical processes and conditions of the global ocean. Measurements include gravity, ocean winds, sea surface temperature, ocean surface topography, sea surface salinity, and circulation. The data support a wide range of applications including climate research, weather prediction, resource management, policy, and the stewardship of ocean data resources.

EMODnet (European Marine Observation and Data Network) is the long term marine data initiative supported by the European Commission since 2009 to ensure that European marine data will become easily accessible, interoperable, and free on restrictions on use. EMODnet Chemistry provides access to standardized, harmonized and validated chemical data collections for water quality evaluation at a regional scale, as defined by the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD). The data portal has adopted and adapted SeaDataNet standards and services, establishing interoperability between the data sets from the many different providers (more than 60 in EMODnet Chemistry network). Concentration maps of nutrients, chlorophyll-a and dissolved oxygen are computed on a standard grid, providing information at a regular time interval, per season and over several vertical layers, including the deepest one. Dedicated OGC standard services for browsing, viewing and downloading chemistry observation, data and data products for the European waters have been developed, and are actively maintained and monitored.

Ireland’s Marine Atlas is developed and maintained by the Marine Institute with funding by the Government of Ireland. This work is part supported by the Irish Government and the European Maritime & Fisheries Fund as part of the EMFF Operational Programme for 2014-2020. The atlas provides a one-stop-shop to view and download marine environmental data relevant to reporting under Ireland’s Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD). The aim of the European Union’s MSFD directive is to protect more effectively the marine environment across Europe through the establishment of “good marine waters”. Data in Ireland’s Marine Atlas has been guided by the European Directive on harmonising environmental data across Europe within a spatial data infrastructure known as INSPIRE. INSPIRE Data Specifications (Data Models) have been used to manage data to the categories visible under THEMES in the atlas. Many of the layers displayed in the Atlas are also used in the National Marine Planning Framework (NMPF). This framework aims to bring together all marine-based human activities, outlining the government’s vision, objectives and marine planning policies for each marine activity. The NMPF report details how these marine activities will interact with each other in an ocean space that is under increasing spatial pressure, ensuring the sustainable use of our marine resources to 2040. Please read the following information carefully as it sets out the terms and conditions that govern the use of products and services on this website. Once you have read these terms and conditions click the "Agree" button at the bottom of the page to proceed. By clicking the "Agree" button you will be deemed to have accepted the terms and conditions, our legal notices and privacy statement.

The World Bank Group works in every major area of development. It provides a wide array of financial products and technical assistance, and it helps countries share and apply innovative knowledge and solutions to the challenges they face.

GBIF, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, is an international network and data infrastructure funded by the world's governments and aimed at providing anyone, anywhere, open access to data about all types of life on Earth. Coordinated through its Secretariat in Copenhagen, the GBIF network of participating countries and organizations, working through participant nodes, provides data-holding institutions around the world with common standards and open-source tools that enable them to share information about where and when species have been recorded. This knowledge derives from many sources, including everything from museum specimens collected in the 18th and 19th century to geotagged smartphone photos shared by amateur naturalists in recent days and weeks. The GBIF network draws all these sources together through the use of data standards, such as Darwin Core, which forms the basis for the bulk of GBIF.org's index of hundreds of millions of species occurrence records. Publishers provide open access to their datasets using machine-readable Creative Commons licence designations, allowing scientists, researchers and others to apply the data in hundreds of peer-reviewed publications and policy papers each year. Many of these analyses, which cover topics from the impacts of climate change and the spread of invasive and alien pests to priorities for conservation and protected areas, food security and human health, would not be possible without this. GBIF arose from a 1999 recommendation by the Biodiversity Informatics Subgroup of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's Megascience Forum. This report concluded that "An international mechanism is needed to make biodiversity data and information accessible worldwide", arguing that this mechanism could produce many economic and social benefits and enable sustainable development by providing sound scientific evidence.