NSF Convergence Accelerator Track E: Backyard Buoys: Equipping Underserved Communities with Ocean Intelligence Platforms

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This project, titled 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. Innovations for this project include a sustainable process for community-led stewardship of affordable ocean buoys and a web-based application that renders data easy to understand and bridges to Indigenous knowledge. An additional benefit of getting wave buoys in the water at diverse and under-measured sites is the generation of data from highly-localized coastal areas available for large scale scientific research to improve climatology and predictions, especially important in light of climate change.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 regional ocean observing networks of the U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS), underserved Indigenous communities, and a sensor company to work 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, as well as low-fidelity data servicing apps formulated in Phase I of the NSF Convergence Accelerator, this project seeks to to revolutionize status quo by using lower-cost tools and deepening the human and data connections that collectively will allow for an effective system that has a focus on the hyper-local scale – sorely lacking in the design of existing ocean observing systems – while assuring it is within a globally-connected network. This is critical for effective advanced planning to ensure a safe blue economy for the communities.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.