With recent limitations on access to laboratories and fieldwork due to covid19, there is renewed interest in doing research that can be done anywhere with an internet link and/or computer access.

There is a rapidly increasing amount of scientific data freely available to researchers. So before going to the trouble of doing more laboratory and fieldwork researchers should check that it is really needed; what will be the added value of collecting more data to test your hypotheses and research questions? This is particularly important in biology and ecology where there are ethical considerations regarding the need to stress animals in the laboratory or capture and kill wild animals (Costello et al. 2016). Another reason to consider reusing previously collected data is the strict time restraints for students who need to do research to get their reports and theses submitted to graduate. Of course, developing laboratory and field research skills is essential to understand how data are collected, but it is risky to depend entirely on new lab and fieldwork producing sufficient quality of data for student projects. Thus recycling existing data saves time and money, and avoids need for ethics approvals uncertainties in data availability.

Using previously collected and now published data does not mean repeating previous work. Being able to ‘reproduce’ the results of a previous study is important, but assuming that is the case, the real added value of data reuse is asking new questions of the data and combining data from different sources to provide new scientific insights.

RESOURCES

Re3data is a catalogue of online databases that use Datacite which “is a leading global non-profit organisation that provides persistent identifiers (DOIs) for research data and other research outputs.”

Figshare is where many researchers publish datasets (including some of my own).

Dryad publishes curated datasets arising from journal articles (including our data on mapping habitats in a marine reserve and trends in numbers of people describing new species).

Zenodo is a repository of European Commission funded research.

Coding Club is to help environmental scientists with data analysis and has free resources and courses. There are free software and a book on Visual stats using R.

Marine Analyst is a collection of European marine biological, geological, conservation, and human activities datasets ready for analysis.

ResourceWatch contains a large number of world maps of marine and terrestrial environmental (including biological) conditions and human activities.

You can create your own data from the literature. The bibliographic databases Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science enable standardized analyses of the scholarly literature. Note Google Scholars ‘Advanced Scholar Search‘ tool which allows you to search by author, journal, years, with and without certain keywords, and save the publications found. You can also create alerts to be emailed citations of new publications based on your selection.

Ecological Register is a collection of terrestrial species abundance data from places around the world.

Lists of biological and marine environmental data sources are here, including the Global Marine Environmental Datasets (Costello and Basher 2019).

Collections of conservation-related tools are shapefiles are hosted by WWF here, and marine maps on the Ocean Data Viewer by UNEP-WCMC.

When you cannot get the numbers from authors to replot their graphs and combine them with your data, there are a few tools that will convert a graph to numbers for you, like the Web Plot Digitiser.

Marine data in Norway’s National Marine Data Centre, Institute of Marine Research Fisheries, MAREANO, Coastal Ecology, Biological and other Environmental Monitoring datasets, including related to aquaculture and sea lice. Marine current velocity is available from the Norwegian Current Information System. In addition, aquaculture data on salmon farm fish health from Norway is freely available. It includes data on where salmon farms are located, trends in sea lice parasites and other diseases on farmed salmon, and fish escaping from farms. See BarentsWatch and marine monitoring data from salmon farms in Norway is freely available at https://vann-nett.no/portal/#/mainmap.

The International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) publishes a range of marine environmental, fishery and ecological data for the North Atlantic.

For Svalbard there is a Polish intertidal database and an online geology resource with e-learning features.

A wide range of seabed habitat features and variables are available for Europe at EMODNET Seabed

How does the aquaculture industry affect the environment?

• Disease
• Emissions from fish farming plants
• Escapes
• Fish mortality and losses in production
• Greenhouse gas emissions
• Impact on wild salmon
• Sales of pharmaceuticals
• Salmon lice
• Utilisation of residual raw materials

What are the production and economy of the aquaculture industry like?

• Costs
• Feed composition and origin
• From feed ingredients to produced fish
• Production value
• Profitability
• Value added– contribution to GDP

How does the aquaculture industry impact community development and social conditions?

• Area use
• Certifications
• Employment
• Job absence
• Occupational injuries
• Societal contributions, taxes and charges

If you want to compare contaminants in wild and farmed seafood options see these resources:

• Seafood data is a database where you can search for and compare the contents of contaminants and nutrients in fish and other seafood 
• European Safety Authority database on chemicals in food
• Benefit and risk assessment of fish in the Norwegian diet 

Another option is to use datasets associated with published papers. For example, this paper’s dataset is here, from Kusumoto, B., Costello, M.J., Kubota, Y., Shiono, T., Wei, C.L., Yasuhara, M. and Chao, A., 2020. Global distribution of coral diversity: Biodiversity knowledge gradients related to spatial resolution. Ecological Research, 35(2), pp.315-326.

References

Costello MJ, Beard KH, Corlett RT, Cumming G, Devictor V, Loyola R, Maas B, Miller-Rushing AJ, Pakeman R, Primack RB. 2016. Field work ethics in biological research. Biological Conservation 203, 268-271. [This article was highlighted in an article on Retraction Watch]

Basher Z, Costello MJ, 2019. World Maps of Ocean Environment Variables. In: Encyclopedia of the World’s Biomes. Reference Module in Earth Systems and Environmental Sciences, Elsevier. 11 pp. ISBN 9780124095489. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-409548-9.12076-7