Abstract Given a team of agents that collect measurements to estimate a scalar field of interest, we propose a coordination strategy that is well-suited for applications in which constant communication amongst agents is either infeasible or undesirable, such as subsea or covert applications. The main idea of the strategy is to rigorously assign a novelty metric to each measurement as it is collected, and only measurements that are sufficiently novel are communicated, provided agents are within communication range. We provide simulation results to illustrate the potential benefits of our coordination strategy and discuss the limitations and challenges associated with our approach.