Scripps Institution of Oceanography

The California Cooperative Ocean Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI) program is one of the longest-running, multidisciplinary ocean monitoring and observing programs in existence. For many years, the emphasis of data management within CalCOFI was to quality control and curate the individual datasets collected on CalCOFI cruises, and make them available to researchers and fisheries managers through printed reports and requests for data to the data curators. Today, a new goal is emerging of having CalCOFI datasets available online and, eventually, interoperable with other CalCOFI-related datasets and the larger, developing federation of the Ocean Observing System data. In this document we review the current state of data management within three of the primary CalCOFI datasets (hydrographic, ichthyoplankton, and zooplankton) and then make recommendations for moving towards the integrated online system that is envisioned, including expanding to other data types. Concrete recommendations for moving forward are summarized in Table 1 and explained in more detail throughout the text.