Hi Paula,

Thanks for the welcome and the questions. The future of Marine Recorder is something that we have been considering ourselves recently. I can’t say too much in response to your first two questions, only that we agree that a strategic solution to the NBN infrastructure is needed, and that it needs to work for both marine and terrestrial recording. This is really a question for the NBN Trust, but we also have our own views and are developing the way forward with the NBN Trust and other partners.

In response to your third question though, I can fill in a bit more detail on our current thoughts on Marine Recorder and the Marine Recorder snapshot. We are aware that Marine Recorder has its shortcomings. Microsoft Access, on which it runs, is really only designed for relatively small-scale personal databases, and the lack of an online interface is far from ideal. We’re also aware that there are a number of other tools such as Indicia at various stages of development and maturity, as well as some more established tools such as the Unicorn database system. This means that benthic data is already being stored in a range of formats and we anticipate that this will increase going forward. There has been some investment into solutions to allow data exchange between these different formats, but these solutions are vulnerable to be being broken by updates to either format.

Our current thinking is therefore that a data exchange format is required, with a standardised structure and list of fields that it would contain. Each organisation collecting benthic data would then be free to use whatever data storage solution best suits them, as long as tools could be developed to allow that stored data to be exported in the data exchange format. The data exchange format would therefore play a similar role to the existing Marine Recorder snapshot, and is likely to bear a strong resemblance to it.

As a first step towards this, we are currently experimenting with online access to, and querying of, the Marine Recorder snapshot. This is based on reproducing the existing snapshot structure in an online, spatial database based on a free and open source database management system, and is part of a broader approach to accessing and using spatial data within JNCC. The use of open-source tools means that it has the advantage of being low cost and reproducible by other organisations. In the longer term I suspect we might be able to make some improvements to the current snapshot format, but given the limited time and resources that we have to commit to this I suspect this is unlikely to happen in the next year. So in the short term the snapshot format will remain stable, and if and when it is changed we would also need to develop some conversion tools so hopefully any transition would be relatively painless.

Finally, it’s worth noting that we currently have no plan to withdraw Marine Recorder. We are aware that lots of organisations have a significant investment in Marine Recorder and many years’ worth of data in NBNData.mdb files. Marine Recorder is unlikely to see any significant further development or new functionality, but we do have a small ongoing budget for fixing major problems and keeping it serviceable in its current form. In the short to medium term, it will therefore remain available for anyone wishing to use it, as one of the growing number of options for storing benthic data.

Hope that makes things a bit clearer. Please feel free to respond with any questions and I’ll answer them as best I can.

James