Become a MiCO Data Contributor

MiCO is an enormous undertaking and its success is directly tied to community involvement. Collective knowledge from MiCO’s network of contributors creates a broader understanding of the use of various habitats as well as the movements of more than 900 migratory marine species to inform international processes supporting area-based planning in areas beyond national jurisdiction.

The ultimate success of this endeavor hinges on MiCO’s ability to complement and add value to existing data, projects, online repositories and observing systems. To do this, MiCO is working to partner with organizations to facilitate the delivery of existing products to management organizations and policy processes in a transparent manner with explicit acknowledgement of data contributors. We intend to provide access to existing derived products through our system which include explicit third-party branding (i.e., your products, your logo). Our aim is to synthesize across contributed data and existing products to provide the most comprehensive information available on how migratory species use and connect the oceans.

MiCO will provide information back to contributors about how their data have been aggregated into more generalized nodes and corridors and how those features have been used in policy arenas. This should aid researchers in their efforts to describe the impact of their work to funders and academic review committees.

As the MiCO system matures, it should serve to identify and highlight knowledge gaps that contributors can use as a basis for securing grants for further work. While we see these benefits of MiCO to contributors as critical to its success, we are constantly interacting with dataholders to better understand their needs and interests and look forward to implementing further functionality to better support contributors. Please contact us at data@mico.eco if you have suggestions for how MiCO might better serve you.

By becoming a MiCO contributor, the information you share can aid in international policy development, resulting in concrete conservation and sustainable use efforts. All contributions to MiCO will be properly acknowledged and cited, and MiCO will never distribute your data. Learn more about how shared data is protected.

The MiCO consortium will also seek to fill these knowledge gaps, integrate existing synthetic efforts and provide the most comprehensive and current products possible.