Hi everybody,
The parent organization of MPA News and several other marine knowledge-sharing services has reorganized to become OCTO, or Open Communications for The Ocean (formerly MARE). OCTO has a lot of arms, so to speak, several of which you may already know:
- MPA News – providing news, analysis, and guidance on marine protected areas since 1999.
- MEAM (Marine Ecosystems and Management) – covering marine ecosystem-based management and ocean planning since 2007.
- OpenChannels.org – the knowledge hub for sustainable ocean management and conservation (e.g., jobs, grants, webinars, scientific literature, reports, conferences, news, blogs, and more).
- EBM Tools Network – providing webinars, tools training, and discussion on tools and methods for improving coastal-marine management and conservation (co-coordinated with NatureServe).
- MarineDebris.info – the global online community for sharing knowledge on research, management, and prevention of ocean plastics.
- And, launched in November 2017, MarXiv (rhymes with archive) – a free repository for marine conservation science and marine climate change science. The site invites researchers to start uploading their preprints, open access papers, reports, and other eligible content – making the science freely available for ocean managers and conservationists to access and apply more easily.
All together, OCTO’s role is to speed the spread of best practices, build robust communities of practice, and lower barriers to knowledge-sharing for the global marine management and conservation community. In the past year, 80,000 ocean professionals from over 120 countries used OCTO’s services.
Thanks for being part of it! By the way, this issue of MPA News covers the months of December and January, allowing our staff a year-end break. We’ll be back in February. If you have any questions or suggestions for MPA News, or if you just want to say hello, please contact me anytime at mpanews@openchannels.org. Best wishes for your work!
John Davis
Editor, MPA News
President, OCTO