Best Practices for Managing Passive Acoustics Data at Ocean Networks Canada

Presented here are the data management best practices applied to passive acoustics data collected by hydrophones from Ocean Networks Canada (ONC) sites. Being the largest single source of data from the observatories, the data collected by hydrophones currently occupy over 700 TB in the archive, spanning about 18 years of observation and data collection. To manage this sheer volume of data, scientific data management best practices are adopted by ONC. Such practices incorporate the entire eight components of the data life cycle: plan, collect, assure, describe, preserve, discover, integrate, and analyze. ONC's data infrastructure, Oceans 3.0, facilitates such data management integration. In addition, ONC is committed to adhering to research data community standards and best practices in data management including FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data principles. These best practices are applied to acoustic data through workflows that record all events of a hydrophone life cycle.