Sovereignty
is architecture.

Data sovereignty is fundamentally a structural property. Written agreements about local ownership offer fragile protection when an external institution holds the actual database. True community control requires the means of data storage and access to sit within the community layer.

Centralized research built the baseline of environmental knowledge institutions rely on today. In that same model, the records communities generate end up in databases held elsewhere, under agreements that depend on institutional priorities and funding cycles.

Benthos treats local governance as a strict engineering requirement. We build infrastructure where community control is encoded into the software. Coastal communities govern their ecological records directly. They decide who can reach the data, what leaves their territory and how it is used; the system enforces those decisions and logs each access. This architectural discipline translates data sovereignty into a concrete, auditable property of the system.

Marine conservation operates across universal scientific standards and national regulations. These domains rely on well-funded technological platforms. The community layer needs the same structural autonomy. Embedding territorial context directly into the code keeps local knowledge under local authority as global climate finance expands.

This thesis extends the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance (Carroll et al., 2020) to local coastal communities. We translate these principles into specific engineering decisions, defining exactly where each governance commitment is written into the system.

The architecture integrates the FAIR Principles for scientific data management (Wilkinson et al., 2016) and structural critiques of data colonialism (Ricaurte, 2019). It also applies differential privacy models (Dwork, 2006) to protect individual identities before any data is shared externally.