FAQs

  • eOceans is a Canadian science and technology company with roots in marine science dating back to 1998 that has expanded to help people turn data into trusted, usable evidence—connecting data collection, management, validation, analysis, reporting, and collaboration in one place.

  • eOceans can take on much of the repetitive technical work between collecting data and using the results.

    Depending on your project, that can include:

    • Data management — collect, import, organize, standardize, validate, and update data.

    • Quality control — catch errors and flag problems as data comes in.

    • GIS — map observations, activities, boundaries, effort, and results.

    • Analysis — automatically run analyses and calculate metrics and scores.

    • Visualization — generate maps, graphs, tables, and dashboards.

    • Reporting — build reports that update as your data changes.

    • Data sharing — publish results, share live reports, and download clean datasets.

    • Collaboration — bring teams, contributors, experts, and multiple data sources into the same project.

    • Ongoing monitoring — keep collecting, analyzing, and reporting without rebuilding the workflow each time.

    You decide what you need to understand and how you want to work. eOceans handles more of the technical work required to get there.

  • The users are the people doing the work — scientists, researchers, consultants, GIS and data specialists, field teams, and other practitioners collecting, managing, analyzing, and reporting environmental data.

    The buyers are the people investing in that work. They may be the users themselves, or managers, directors, funders, or organizations looking to get more done with the people and resources they already have.

    The beneficiaries are the people who use the resulting evidence to make decisions — clients, policymakers, investors, purchasers, insurers, blue bond holders, communities, and others.

    eOceans helps the people doing the work do more, helps those funding it get more from their investment, and gives decision-makers better evidence to work with.

  • Yes. You don't need to be part of an organization to use eOceans. What you can do depends on what you want to use it for.

    Want to run your own project? You can create a project, collect and manage your data, analyze it, and generate reports without being part of an organization.

    Want to keep your data private? You can collect and manage your own data without sharing it with anyone else.

    Want to contribute as a citizen scientist? You can use the eOceans app to record your own observations. Just join eOceans and the relevant project, such as eShark, eManta, eSeahorse, or another open contribution project, before you start contributing observations.

    Whether you're running your own research project, documenting what you're seeing around you, or contributing to a larger community science effort, you can use eOceans without an organization behind you.

  • Yes. You don't need to be part of an organization to use eOceans. What you can do depends on what you want to use it for.

    Want to run your own project? You can create a project, collect and manage your data, analyze it, and generate reports without being part of an organization.

    Want to keep your data private? You can collect and manage your own data without sharing it with anyone else.

    Want to contribute as a citizen scientist? You can use the eOceans app to record your own observations. Just join eOceans and the relevant project, such as eShark, eManta, eSeahorse, or another open contribution project, before you start contributing observations.

    Whether you're running your own research project, documenting what you're seeing around you, or contributing to a larger community science effort, you can use eOceans without an organization behind you.

  • Yes. Create your project. Then, upload your existing data into the project using the eOceans Magic Uploads™ tool.

    eOceans automatically reads, formats, and adds your data to your project repository. It then automatically applies your project’s analyses, visualizations, and reports for immediate review.

    Explore the trends: view maps, graphs, and tables, examine survey effort, compare datasets, locations, or species, and track your key metrics as you add more data.

    You don't have to start collecting new data. Bring the data you already have and start getting more from it.

  • It depends on what jobs you want eOceans to do for you.

    eOceans starts free, so you can begin automating your workflow and add subscriptions as you grow — more analysis, data downloads, accurate maps, scores, and projects.

    Scale as your needs grow, with Enterprise plans for complex workflows and interoperability across projects, teams, and organizations.

    View pricing →

Why eOceans

  • No. Public platforms are designed primarily to collect and share data openly. eOceans is designed for your work—including private projects, organizational monitoring, assessments, research, and reporting. You control who can access your data and results, with the option to make them public when you choose.

  • eOceans handles much of the work that typically requires connecting databases, GIS, analysis, reporting, and other tools together. Instead of needing specialized people to build and maintain those connections for every project, your workflow is built into your project and stays connected as your data change.

  • Consultants can be valuable when you need specialized expertise for a specific problem. But if you are collecting data continuously, you shouldn’t have to rebuild the analytical machinery every time you need an answer. eOceans lets your team keep the workflow, data, methods, and outputs connected—so you can keep working as new data and questions arise.

  • You can. But the cost of building and maintaining it is only the beginning.

    Build one app for salmon. Another for lobsters. Another for whales. Another for ticks. Another for avian flu. A new one for each organization, location, or purpose.

    Each may work well for its specific purpose—but now you have multiple systems and multiple workflows. And when you need to connect them, the silos become the problem.

    How do you bring the salmon, whales, and lobster data together when the question crosses all three?

    eOceans provides the underlying infrastructure across projects, species, questions, and data types.

    Instead of continually building the machinery for each new problem, your team can focus on what the system needs to accomplish—and build on the work you’ve already done.

  • You can—and sometimes you should. But adding people doesn’t eliminate the work; it adds capacity to do it.

    The question is how efficiently that capacity is used. eOceans helps your team spend less time cleaning, connecting, formatting, and rebuilding workflows, and more time on the work that requires their expertise and judgment.

What eOceans does

  • eOceans turns field observations and other data into clean, validated data, maps, analyses, and reports—automating the work between data collection and decision-ready results.

  • Yes—eOceans gives you a secure place to do your work with your own data, with control over access, sharing, and publication.

  • It includes data management and storage, but eOceans goes further by connecting your data to validation, analysis, visualization, reporting, and collaboration.

  • It includes mapping and spatial analysis, but eOceans connects GIS-like capabilities directly to your data, analyses, and reports.

  • No—eOceans is designed to let teams collect, manage, analyze, and report their data without needing to build their own data-science infrastructure. If you have data scientists, then their time can be better spent then on the basics.

  • Yes—eOceans can turn validated data and analyses into reproducible, customizable reports and outputs on demand.

  • Yes—your analyses and reports can be updated as new observations are added, so your results can keep pace with your ongoing work.

  • No—eOceans is software that lets you run repeatable workflows yourself, although expert support can be available when you need it.

  • No—it’s an automation platform that can accelerate the time from data collection to reports by more than 90%, without using AI. This keeps costs low, trust high, and your data under your control. If we add AI features we will be clear about when and where AI is used and give you the option.

  • No—you can generate maps, analyses, and reports without knowing GIS, R, Python, or other programming tools.

One system — Many ways to use it

  • Guides and guests can collect observations, build the dive shop’s own biodiversity record, and use the results to improve and market the experience or support protection of the sites they visit—saving time, creating new value from every dive, and generating evidence that can help protect the places their business depends on.

  • A nation can collect information about its own resources, retain control of that information, build internal analytical capacity, and use the results to support management, planning, and negotiations—reducing dependence on outside expertise, increasing community capacity, and getting from information to evidence and action faster.

  • Banks can organize evidence about nature and society across investments, monitor changing risks and impacts, and produce consistent, traceable analyses and reports to support investment decisions and accountability—reducing the time and cost of evidence gathering while improving the speed and consistency of environmental and social due diligence.

  • Philanthropic organizations can bring evidence from funded projects together, monitor progress and outcomes, and generate consistent reporting without requiring every grantee to rebuild the same data infrastructure—getting more evidence and accountability from every dollar invested while reducing the reporting burden on grantees.

  • Small NGOs can build clean, standardized datasets and generate analyses, maps, and reports without needing a large technical or data-science team—stretching limited budgets further and allowing a small team to deliver more evidence and impact.

  • Large NGOs can standardize data and workflows across multiple projects, teams, and locations while maintaining control over each project and connecting evidence when they choose—reducing duplicated effort, increasing organizational capacity, and getting more value from investments in monitoring and research.

  • Community groups can collect and manage their own observations, build credible local evidence, and decide what to keep private, share with partners, or publish—increasing their capacity to understand and advocate for the places and issues they care about without needing a large technical team.

  • Consultants can turn client data into validated analyses and reports through repeatable workflows that can be reused and updated instead of rebuilt for every project—saving billable and non-billable time, increasing project capacity, and delivering results to clients faster.

  • Postdocs can manage research datasets and workflows across projects and collaborators while reducing the time spent rebuilding data management, analysis, and reporting processes—increasing research capacity and publications while spending more time on science and less on data science.

  • PhD researchers can build repeatable data-to-analysis workflows that make it easier to manage complex datasets, reproduce results, and share or publish their work—saving months of repetitive work, increasing research output, and getting to publications and new opportunities faster.

  • Students can collect and manage research data, build clean standardized datasets, and move from observations to analyses, maps, and reports without having to build the infrastructure themselves—saving time, learning more valuable analytical skills, and getting further with their research within a limited degree timeline.

  • State teams can manage monitoring data across programs and locations, automate analysis and reporting, and maintain consistent, reproducible evidence for decisions—saving staff time and money while increasing the speed and scale of evidence production.

  • Federal teams can standardize and connect monitoring across programs, regions, and projects while continuously updating analyses and reports—reducing duplicated work, increasing the amount of evidence teams can produce, and getting decision-ready results faster.

  • Provincial teams can standardize monitoring across projects and regions, continuously update analyses and reports, and share the evidence they choose across departments and partners—reducing duplicated effort, increasing analytical capacity, and getting more results from existing monitoring investments.

  • Municipal teams can collect and manage local observations, turn them into validated analyses and reports, and maintain an up-to-date evidence base for planning and decisions—saving staff time and budget while getting the evidence needed for decisions faster.

  • eOceans helps students learn good data-collection practices by putting the research process into practice — from designing what to measure through collecting, checking, analyzing, and communicating the results.

  • Yes. Give students a structured workflow for collecting field data consistently, with standardized variables, required fields, automatic time and location capture, photos and immediate visualization. Instead of teaching students how to clean up a spreadsheet after fieldwork, you can build better data practices into collection itself.

  • Research groups can connect data, methods, analyses, and collaborators across projects while maintaining provenance, permissions, reproducibility, and control over their work—reducing duplicated effort, increasing research capacity and output, and getting from data to publications and decisions faster.

Data Standards, Reproducibility, and Privacy

  • No—your data remains under your control, and you decide what information, if any, is made public. If you export your data then you can share how you would like.

  • Yes—you retain ownership of the data you create, upload, and manage in eOceans. You can then decide to keep it private or to share with projects by joining them.

  • Yes—the default is public but you can keep your project and its data private while still using eOceans for data management, analysis, and reporting.

  • No—eOceans does not use your private project data to train AI models. If

  • Yes—with you can export your data and use it with other systems and workflows.

  • Yes—you can bring existing datasets into eOceans and connect them to new observations, analyses, and reports.

  • Yes—multiple organizations can collaborate on the same project while maintaining defined permissions and control over their own information.

  • Better research doesn't come only from more sophisticated analysis. It also depends on whether the underlying data are complete, consistent, traceable and reusable. eOceans helps build those qualities into the research workflow, reducing the manual work and errors that can occur between field collection and analysis.

  • No. eOceans is designed to improve the workflow from research design and data collection through data management, quality control, visualization and reporting. Researchers can then export their data for statistical analysis, spatial analysis or other specialized workflows.

  • Yes. Project owners can control who can access and contribute to project data. This allows researchers, students, organizations and external collaborators to work from the same structured dataset without creating separate copies in spreadsheets and other systems.

  • Yes. With Data Downloads enabled, team administrators/owners can download data for analysis in other software, including R, GIS and spreadsheets. eOceans handles the structured collection, organization, validation and visualization of your data, while you remain free to use the analytical tools that fit your research.

  • Yes—you can control who can view your project by inviting them to contribute, view, sharing your project links, sharing PDFs, and more.

Our Approach and Independence

  • Yes—eOceans offers a genuinely useful free tier so students, small NGOs, researchers, and others can start projects, collect clean, standardized data, and build toward analysis, maps, reports, and publications without having to first secure funding for data infrastructure.

  • Paid plans provide greater capacity, privacy, collaboration, automation, and analytical capabilities for larger, more complex, or more sensitive projects.

  • eOceans is a commercial science and technology company so it can build and maintain independent infrastructure, invest continuously in the technology, and make it available without depending on grants or institutional funding.

  • eOceans is designed to be sustained by the people and organizations that use it rather than by funders, allowing us to remain independent while continuing to invest in the system and keep a free entry point available.

  • Yes—organizations can manage multiple projects and control access and permissions across their teams and collaborators.

  • Yes—your consultant can work in your eOceans project with the permissions you choose, while your organization retains control of the project and its data.

  • eOceans is intentionally independent so it can serve people and organizations across universities, governments, businesses, NGOs, and communities without being tied to one institution or mandate.

Still have questions? Our team is here to help.

Contact us or visit our how-to page for more information on using eOceans.

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