Ocean best practices are useful to ensure data quality, comparability, and collatability across surveys, equipment, and environments. However, there is less understanding of how a method is deemed a ‘best practice’, and there are efforts to resolve this through developing criteria for practice maturity and international endorsement. This presentation will provide an update on the national marine standard operating procedure (SOP) project from the NESP Marine and Coastal Hub and apply learnings from this project to the global development and endorsement of ocean best practices.
In the past year, the SOP project has updated prevoius SOPs and produced three new ones on microplastics, wide-field stereo drop cameras, and socioeconomic surveys. With the release of Version 3 of the SOP package, over 220 individuals from 76 agencies have contributed to the project, and the SOPs are being applied to a range of monitoring activities in Australia and elsewhere. Despite their uptake and impact, they have yet to meet the requirements of the highest maturity level for an ocean practice because they have not yet been officially endorsed by an internationally recognised process (e.g. Ocean Best Practices System). Efforts are currently underway to obtain endorsement for these and other Australian ocean practices.