Extended Learning

This course is designed for professionals and researchers who are passionate about oceans, fisheries and sustainable development. This course is a gateway to understanding aquatic databases and equips students with the introductory skills to sample, visualize, and analyze data to inform decisions. Using aquatic databases is critical in driving sustainable practices and fostering equitable blue economic sectors.

Throughout the course, professionals working in the fields of marine biology, ocean management, and conservation will develop an introductory understanding of aquatic databases’ unique datasets and infrastructure. This introduction will improve students’ ability to harness the wealth of information databases offer. By enhancing data sampling skills, professionals can become more proficient data-driven decision-makers.

By the end of this course, students will be able to:

• Understand the purpose and infrastructure of aquatic databases, including how to access:

• taxonomy and nomenclature of species databases
• species traits in biological databases
• habitat and ecology data in global information databases

• Prepare a research question to respond to problems in the context of aquatic data sciences
• Generate a dataset to respond to the prepared research question
• Solve possible questions and imagine future applications of the acquired knowledge

Deng Palomares is the course developer and instructor. She is a senior scientist and project manager of Sea Around Us and a renowned leader who applies data sciences to the field of ocean management in many different scenarios. By participating in weekly live lectures with the instructor and other hands-on activities, students are challenged to develop a research question, understand the data sampling process and generate a correspondent dataset. Advanced students will be tasked to experiment with analytics based on their generated dataset. Moreover, students will learn about the intricacies of FishBase and SeaLifeBase, building skills to leverage their biodiversity information systems and apply their biological and ecological tools.