Expanding "Backyard Buoys" for safeguarding Indigenous community blue economy

Summary: Under the National Science Foundation (NSF) Convergence Accelerator program, a new project known as “Backyard Buoys” empowers Indigenous and other coastal communities to collect and use ocean data to support their blue economy: maritime activities, food security, and coastal hazard protection. We bring together three regional ocean observing networks of the U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS), underserved Indigenous coastal communities, and a sensor company (Sofar Ocean) as partners working collectively to democratize local wave measurements and provide a solution to the existing hurdle of observing technologies that are too expensive to purchase and to sustain.

Through co-design of an implementation and stewardship plan and low bandwidth data servicing apps, we aim to revolutionize the status quo. To do this, we will use lower-cost tools and deepen the human and data connections to collectively facilitate an effective system that has a focus on hyper-local scale observations—sorely lacking in the design of existing ocean observing systems—while assuring the effort is grounded it is within and supported by a globally-connected network.

Our work starts to address inequities and helps to increase autonomy, as community members will choose where and how the buoys are deployed—in places where it matters most to them—and will steward the buoys in their community. This facilitates their blue economy with safer and more efficient fishing, cultural practices, and local entrepreneurs. Wave data are needed to improve safety and to help better understand environmental changes and alert residents to potential breach events. Hundreds of lives, millions of dollars of revenue, and cultural resilience is at stake in each community.

We propose to hold a workshop to provide insights from the project, discuss, and to entrain interest in expanding the program. While this is being developed within three of the IOOS regional associations, interest has been expressed from several of the others who want to scope and implement this concept within their regions. We believe the infrastructure that IOOS provides is critical to bridging the gap of a lack of affordable wave buoy systems and increasing Indigenous ownership of ocean observations that protect their lives and livelihood.

Sector: Academia, Industry, Government, Tribal Nation, Indigenous Community
Organization: U.S. IOOS Regional Associations
POC: Jan Newton, janewton@uw.edu
Other Contacts: Melissa Iwamoto, mmiwamot@hawaii.edu; Wisdom Sheyna,
wisdom@aoos.org