Backyard Buoys: meeting coastal Indigenous community needs for wave data through co-design and co-production

The Backyard Buoys™ project (www.backyardbuoys.org) enables Indigenous and coastal communities to gather and use wave data, enhancing their blue economy and hazard protection. These communities have been historically underserved, and climate change is making weather and wave predictability even harder. Leveraging low-cost, scalable marine technology in partnership with regional ocean observing networks, Backyard Buoys offers a system for community-managed ocean buoys and data access to complement Indigenous Knowledge. Through co-design of an implementation and stewardship plan, as well as apps tailored to transmit data in low-bandwidth scenarios and render data easy to access and understand, we are revolutionizing the status quo. By using lower-cost tools and deepening the human and data connections, collectively our system is addressing needs within the hyper-local scale – sorely lacking in the design of existing ocean observing systems – while assuring it is within a globally-connected network. The Indigenous communities involved are now the stewards of the wave buoys within their own waters, with a plan for sustaining beyond the project in an ongoing partnership with the U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) regional ocean observing systems. While the need for wave data from lower-cost, more-easily serviced buoys was a clear motivation, this project focused on working together to overcome barriers and challenges as communities deployed buoys in the water, addressed permitting requirements, and fostered autonomous stewardship into the future. We are preparing materials to enable knowledge transfer of procedures and keys to success beyond the project.