FAQs

About eOceans

  • eOceans is the all-in-one platform for environmental intelligence. It transforms how people and organizations collect, manage, analyze, and share data on ecosystems, communities, threats, and policies—making complex work efficient, standardized, and impactful.

  • Researchers, governments, NGOs, citizen scientists, First Nations, businesses, and community groups. Whether you’re tracking a single species, evaluating policies, or managing large-scale, highly complex projects, eOceans adapts to your needs.

  • By streamlining entire workflows—data collection, management, analysis, visualization, reporting, education, and dissemination—eOceans delivers results up to 80% faster and enables collaboration across teams, regions, and disciplines.

  • Yes. eOceans was designed to unify efforts across regions, disciplines, and interests. By standardising data and making it interoperable, we enable projects to connect, scale, and collaborate holistically—helping everyone move further, faster, together.

  • Projects often hire companies with cameras, sensors, or proprietary software to track their own work. While valuable, this creates several challenges that eOceans uniquely solves:

    a. Trust & Independence — A third-party system builds credibility. Funders, governments, and communities shouldn’t have to rely only on a company to document its own success. eOceans provides an independent, transparent layer of accountability.

    b. Data fusion & bigger picture — Company-led monitoring only captures what their methods and region allow. To truly measure impact, you need multiple perspectives: other sampling methods, upstream/downstream effects, community observations, and broader ecological context. eOceans fuses these into one system.

    c. Data Sovereignty — Who owns the data; the company, the Nation, or the funder? eOceans ensures proper governance, secure sharing, and clear ownership so communities and partners remain in control.

    d. Before-After, Control-Impact (BACI) — To measure restoration success, you need baseline data — not just after planting. eOceans makes it possible to integrate historic, local, and ongoing data to answer “Where should we seed?” and “What changed?”

    e. Breaking silos & ensuring longevity — If monitoring is locked inside one company, it won’t connect with government, researchers, or community guardians. eOceans keeps data usable and interoperable long after a project ends.

    f. Scalability — A single project may look large on paper, but to truly tell the story of ocean recovery, you need comparable data across many projects, regions, and years. That’s exactly what eOceans was built for.

  • Yes and no.

    While we use to, as scientists, publishing is not a priority.

    Our philosophy is to make science fast, collaborative, iterative, transparent and ethically open, with the goal of fully democratizing how science is done and shared.

    While we still see value in publishing, especially ideas that influence what we put in the platform, we don’t see the value in publishing dynamic monitoring data and insights that are always changing.

  • We support global best practices, including both FAIR and CARE principles. Data are standardized and available for quality-checking in near real-time, sensitive locations are protected, and individuals retain control of their data and decide who to share with.

How eOceans Works

  • By using the eOceans mobile app to log observations offline in the field. You can capture biodiversity, threats, environmental variables, human activity, or any other metrics using any sampling method. Your data is automatically standardized for analysis and sharing. Depending on your needs and budget, you can also sync sensor data.

  • Once uploaded, eOceans standardizes and organizes your observations, stores them securely, and automatically shares them with the projects you’ve joined. Data are shared according to your preferences, that of each project’s needs, and the details of the observation—such as location or sampling method.

  • Yes. eOceans enables collaboration across researchers, organizations, and regions. Teams can contribute simultaneously while maintaining data integrity, see updates in near real-time, and avoid duplicated effort.

  • Maps, graphs, tables, and scores are automatically created from your data streams. This allows you to track trends, identify gaps, and make decisions quickly without manual analysis.

  • Absolutely. Data are standardized, traceable, and exportable in clean, interoperable formats. View results in our interactive dashboard, or export them for your own analyses, assessments, contractual reporting, or policy evaluation—ensuring both accuracy and transparency.

  • For a species list — we have all your species already in the app, no need to provide your own list.

    If you see something is missing, first make sure you have the “complete list” selected when logging into the app.

    Then consult WoRMS to see if the species you’re looking for is still accepted. They update daily, so you shouldn’t have any issues finding the species you need.

    A location list can be uploaded into your project. See our “How-to” page for more details on defining your study area and uploading your site list.

  • The eOceans projects, such as eShark and eManta are global projects in the eOceans platform that compile all the data that meets the criteria of the specific project.

    It is voluntary collaboration and free for anyone to join.

    The data in these projects cannot be downloaded which means you always know how the data are being used, and can help validate and co-interpret results. It is a global collaboration opportunity and we welcome you to be apart of it.

    Please note that raw data and locations are not openly available in these projects.

  • Data sharing can be turned off and on for all team members in each project. If data sharing is not enabled for someone in your team, it means that their observations will not be included when data is downloaded from eOceans.

    You can check who has data sharing enabled by looking at the users tab of the team’s page on the web app. If someone in your team does not have it enabled, they can enable it by going to the teams page on the mobile app and toggling the location sharing icon (white location pin) on/off.

For Organisations

  • eOceans centralises and standardises data collection, management, analysis, and reporting in a single platform. Track biodiversity, human activities, environmental pressures, and policy impacts efficiently—across sites, teams, and projects. It also helps disseminate science-based information and curb misinformation.

  • Yes. eOceans supports multi-team, cross-department, and cross-organisation collaboration while keeping access controlled. Everyone works from the same standardised datasets.

  • All data are traceable, standardised, and exportable. Use our interactive dashboards, visualisations, and reports to support decision-making, satisfy funders, meet regulatory requirements, or strengthen policy submissions.

  • Absolutely. eOceans can handle data from any source—field log sheets, sensors, spreadsheets, or legacy datasets—and converts them into your results, with maps, graphs, tables, and reports.

  • When you decide to end your subscription, your current project(s) are archived. You are still able to view them on the eOceans platform but you will no longer be able to add new data to the project.

  • Yes. eOceans is built on ethical, open science principles, prioritising privacy, ownership, and data ethics, including data democracy and self-determination.

    Individuals control who can access their data, exact locations are protected, and all sharing can align with FAIR and CARE principles— if you choose, because you decide how your data are used.

For Individuals

  • No. eOceans is designed for everyone—from students and volunteers to professional scientists. The app guides you through data collection so you can start contributing immediately. If you want to start your own team, we can help you design the project, set up geofences, and get everything ready.

  • Yes. The mobile app works offline for collecting data in the field. Then, review your entries and upload when you are connected to the internet.

  • Absolutely. Log your observations once, and eOceans automatically shares relevant data with all projects you’ve “Joined”, based on location, sampling method, and more. Log and eOceans does the rest following your preferences.

  • It’s your data. eOceans was designed to facilitate “Ethically Open Science”, where exact location information is protected and you control who can use your data. If you choose to share your data with others, by “Joining” those projects, they can then follow ethical standards, including FAIR and CARE principles, and can clearly outline the risks and values in the “Ethics and Acknowledgements” section of the project.

  • Your impact can be as big as you want—shaped by the quality of the data you contribute, how it’s used, and who you share it with. When your observations feed into research, policy decisions, and conservation efforts, you’re helping protect species, habitats, and communities while advancing science on a global scale.

  • Your activity is one of the most important pieces of information that influences what you observe. Sailing across the surface of the ocean, diving or snorkelling below the surface, fishing from shore, taking a cruise, or lounging on a beach — all these activities enable different types of observations. Your activity allows your effort to be standardized through space and time.

  • We have an “ID me please” check box that can be selected during an observation. Check this box and we can help you find the correct observation for your species.

    Its best to err on the side of caution, if you aren’t sure exactly what you observed, just record “Unknown species” and add your suspicions in the comments.

Plans and Pricing

  • The FREE App is for anyone collecting data in the field using any sampling methodology. You can contribute to existing projects by joining those teams or by upgrading to PRO.

  • PRO is designed for individuals, turning the eOceans app into a personal data assistant. It lets you maintain a personal site list for after-the-fact logging and download your data in clean, interoperable formats for archives, contractual obligations, self-analysis, reporting, and more.

  • Starter Team gives your data collection team access to all core tools: collect data offline in the field with the FREE eOceans app, automatically manage your data, and explore it through interactive maps, graphs, and tables. Reports can also be generated, giving you everything you need to launch a project efficiently.

  • Pricing depends on your team size, project scope, and which features you need. Our non-enterprise plans are designed for individuals, students, and small NGOs with limited budgets. Larger teams and complex projects may require Enterprise pricing.

  • All non-enterprise prices are designed for shoestring budgets, ideal for students and small NGOs. Larger teams and complex projects may require enterprise pricing.

  • Yes. Plans are flexible—you can upgrade to add capacity and advanced features or adjust your plan if your team size or project scope changes. However, project study area and variables are fixed — a new project can be created if a new study area or variables are needed.

  • No—there is no daily limit. The starter team package is flexible so you can work through the high and low periods of observations without having to worry about changing plans. There is only a limit to the total number of records per year when using the “Starter Plan” option.

    If you need more surveys/observations than the starter plan offers, contact us so we can fit a plan to your needs.

  • If you have updated your payment method to a new card, eOceans will use the new card as the “default” to pay for your subscriptions. However, updating your card does not remove the other, older card. If you received an email that an old card is expiring, it is because it remains in the eOceans system. To remove it, click on the link in the email or go into your team’s page on the web app and click “Settings” then “Manage Payments or Cancellations”. Here you can delete or add cards to your account, and change default ones. If you do not remove the card, you may continue to get automated emails that the card is expiring, even though it is not associated with a subscription.

Data Quality

  • Human error is the biggest source of data quality issues—messy handwriting, mistaken entries, or mismanaged spreadsheets can lead to 7–12% error rates. eOceans eliminates these by using your smartphone’s date, time, and location systems, applying standardised methods and species taxonomy, and ensuring near real-time entry. All data are automatically standardised upon upload, keeping consistency across users, methods, and projects. Built-in Peer-to-Peer checks, ID tools, Field Guides, and other features further strengthen accuracy, while every record remains traceable to its source.

  • Unlike ad-hoc spreadsheets or hobbyist apps, eOceans was designed by professional scientists with decades of experience in science, environmental monitoring, and policy to meet the standards of reproducibility, traceability, and interoperability required. It embeds scientific best practices into every step—from collection through analysis—so results can confidently inform conservation, management, business development, and more.

  • eOceans supports multiple data streams—manual entries, sensor integrations, and data uploads—and harmonises them into a unified, standardised format. This enables analysis to happen immediately, while maintaining the detail and integrity of each project.

  • Errors are inevitable, but eOceans helps identify, document, and mitigate them with traceability, metadata tagging, and transparent workflows. When data are treated or removed, this is displayed in the app or dashboard. This makes results defensible, repeatable, and trustworthy for reporting and policy.

  • By aligning with FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and CARE (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, Ethics) principles, eOceans ensures that data are not only high-quality but also ethically managed, responsibly shared, and maximally useful to both local communities and global science.

  • As with all monitoring and science projects, data quality depends on the project’s objectives, training, communications, and the commitment of its team. Citizen science can be highly reliable and valuable when designed and executed properly. eOceans was built and validated around large-scale citizen science initiatives, ensuring that outputs meet the same quality benchmarks as professional research and can confidently inform decision-making.

Getting Started

  • Download the free eOceans mobile app to begin logging observations or join an existing project. If you’d like to start your own project or upgrade to PRO, visit our Pricing page.

  • Both no and yes. The app is intuitive for anyone—from students and volunteers to professional scientists—with clear instructions and built-in tools to get you started right away. However, if you’re contributing to a specific project, you’ll need to follow that project’s methods to ensure data are collected correctly and consistently.

  • Yes. You can launch your own project with our Starter Team or Enterprise plans. We’ll support you with project design, geofencing for your study area, onboarding your team, and more.

  • In near real-time. Once data are entered or uploaded, you can immediately view them in eOceans’ interactive dashboards—maps, graphs, and tables—helping you track progress and adapt as needed.

  • Our team is here to help. Reach for onboarding support, technical or logistical assistance, project design advice, and more. 
    Contact us

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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