The Making of the Ocean Health Index

If all goes well, when a scientific paper is published and the media pick up on the story, a lot of effort gets boiled down into a soundbite. New cure for cancer discovered. Water found on Mars. Fish stocks disappearing from the world’s oceans.

This focus can be a good thing for communicating science to the public, but it masks a lot of what was necessary to produce that result. Often, the story of how, and why, science gets done is as interesting and important as the actual result. Indeed, the decisions about what does not belong in the soundbite are as critical as the decisions about what does. We’ve all heard about aha! moments or the apple falling on Newton’s head. Most of the time, the story is much messier than that, but also often more compelling.

This is the first in a series of stories in which we will explain, explore and expose the process of science — as it is happening — for a large, collaborative, international project to develop a single composite measure for the health of the world’s oceans. The Ocean Health Index is trying to capture and synthesize how people benefit from marine systems and the ways that we interact with and affect ocean health — all in a single number.

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