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ActSmall · Ocean

About ActSmall · Ocean

Sister site to Water, Air, Fire, Food, Forest, and Bees: public data, plain language, one honest action per click. The shared policies (privacy, license, terms, contribute) live on actsmall.org — this page covers only what is specific to ocean.

Mission

ActSmall · Ocean exists to make it easier for anyone — a coastal volunteer, a science teacher, a student, a person who simply cares about a particular coast — to see what is actually happening with marine protection and threatened-species listings near them, and to find a low-cost, citizen-scale thing to do about it.

Data sources for ocean

The country map joins these open-data feeds, pulled once a day at ~23:19 UTC (with up to a 60-minute jitter window) by a small AWS Lambda.

  • Marine protected areas as % of — World Bank ER.MRN.PTMR.ZS (CC BY 4.0). Source data via UNEP-WCMC and ’s Protected Planet.
  • Threatened fish species (count) — World Bank EN.FSH.THRD.NO, Red List source.
  • Five-year change — computed in our aggregator from each country’s time series, same windowing approach as Forest.
  • Country borders — Natural Earth (public domain).
  • Basemap — OpenFreeMap & OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL).
  • Action catalog — editorially curated; live/actions.json is rewritten after the daily link curator. See /live/curator.json.

How the daily refresh and curator work in general: actsmall.org/methodology/.

Editorial care specific to ocean

  • No mystery scores. We do not blend indices we cannot explain on one screen. The map shows the named indicators above and nothing else.
  • Landlocked states. Often lack a marine indicator row — the recommender surfaces data-gap actions (which here are mostly advocacy and open-data contribution) rather than guessing.

If something is wrong

If you find an error, an out-of-date source, a broken link, or a claim that overstates the underlying evidence: please email submissions@actsmall.org with the page URL and what looks wrong. The maintainers will review.

Where to read more