Inventory and spatial distribution of French marine observation and monitoring systems in the English Channel, North Sea and Celtic Seas

This study aims to provide a clearer picture of the landscape of observation and monitoring systems, using the Channel, North Sea, and Celtic Seas marine subregion as a case study. Four criterias described an observatory. - Its goal is to continue for at least five years.  this criterion is met as soon as the system's duration is long-term, even if uncertain. - The same operators are implementing the program. - Data must be collected repeatedly, without necessarily having a minimum or stable frequency to adhere to. - The technical and organizational functions are implemented within the framework of a specific and shared knowledge objective. In order to understand the broader landscape of observation, this study therefore takes into account not only the observation systems operated by the scientific community or government agencies, but also those operated by associations, local authorities, and professionals. Inventories of monitoring programs have been conducted in the past, but these are incomplete and focus only on specific themes or categories of stakeholders. For example, the coastal regional offices of the French Office for Biodiversity conducted an inventory of marine biodiversity monitoring in 2022. More recently, Fr-OOS launched a project to catalog scientific monitoring of the marine environment (Fr-OOS, 2024). This lack of a comprehensive overview of all observation systems deployed in metropolitan coastal areas is what we will attempt to address by integrating all systems, including participatory and opportunistic monitoring. The first goal is to provide as comprehensive an overview as possible of the monitoring systems for coastal socio-ecosystems in the subregion comprising the English Channel, the North Sea, and the Celtic Seas. The aim is thus to identify which themes are addressed by the observation systems and their relative importance in order to identify potential gaps, and to better understand the geographical distribution of the observation systems and which areas are more or less well-observed. The second objective concerns the analysis of the structure of these systems in terms of governance and connections between them. Finally, the aim is to assess the extent to which the data produced by the observation systems comply with the principles of open data