Whenever I tell people my work involves monitoring lakes over decades, the response is often a polite yet firm nod, implicitly signalling that routine data collection must be a bit, well, boring.

It does, admittedly, involve a lot of repetitive days out in the field. Soggy sandwiches and holes in socks abound as researchers dedicate decades and generations to monitoring the ongoing and changing health of a forest, desert or lake.

The recent decision to defund the US’ Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) — which was just, thankfully, rescinded — recently spotlighted how critical this work is.

The OOI comprises almost a thousand instruments that, day by day, pull together different streams of data and information about the ocean to build a complex and ever-changing picture of its fluctuating states.

And while it might seem obvious, we cannot know what is wrong with an environmental system if we are not keeping a careful eye on how it is changing.

Just think about how we track human health and the value that brings. We do not wait........

© National Observer