By Brendon Bosworth, posted on November 28th, 2012 in Earth Observation, Featured Article, Oceans
A school of fish. Image Credit: Matthew Hoelscher
Since a key area of focus for EGIDA researchers is the Mediterranean, the project has assisted in the development of online tools for sharing environmental data between scientists and decision-makers in the region.
One such tool is a webmapping application developed by David March Morlà, a consultant with Spanish research institute Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), for the Gulf of Lions, a bay in the Mediterranean that lies between France and Spain. The application, which is still in its pilot stages, originated from a collaboration with the KnowSeas (knowledge-based sustainable management for Europe’s seas) project, a 4-year endeavor that ends in 2013 and brings together 32 partners from 16 countries with the intent of implementing an “ecosystems approach” to management of the Baltic, Black, Mediterranean and Northeast Atlantic seas.
Applying this ecosystems approach to marine management, KnowSeas incorporates geospatial, economic, and social science data, and a broad spectrum of practitioners, explains Tim O’Higgins, operational director for KnowSeas, based at the Scottish Association for Marine Science, the body responsible for coordinating the project.
“We are trying to draw the links from the ecological system back into the social system and measure the effects of the damage we’re doing to the environment,” says O’ Higgins. He emphasizes that the way data is managed varies widely throughout Europe and there is a need for a multidisciplinary spatial database, like KnowSeas, that is easily accessible to decision-makers.
The Gulf of Lions tool March Morlà created makes use of a GIS interface, with layers for physical systems, including sea surface temperature and coastal erosion, and biological systems, including seabed habitats. When completed, the tool will allow decision-makers to easily visualize and use data, while offering researchers information about where the data was sourced, how it was generated, and the ability to download datasets, explains March Morlà.
A satellite image of the Gulf of Lions. Credit: NASA
Cinnirella’s work with March Morlà involved applying the “system of systems” approach to the development of the Mediterranean web tool. This resulted in tweaking the application from its original design, envisaged as single-user tool, to a more advanced multi-user tool that complies with Open Geospatial Consortium standards for interoperability (a report on outcomes of Cinnirella’s research is available as a pdf).
Ultimately, such a tool aims to make environmental data available, and share it among researchers and decision-makers, instead of leaving it “closed in some box somewhere,” says Cinnirella.
Another EGIDA use case involves supporting the development of Info-Map, a system for sharing environmental metadata between members of the Barcelona Convention. Twenty-two parties have signed the convention, which aims to protect the Mediterranean Sea from pollution from ships, aircraft and land-based sources (Albania, Algeria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Cyprus, Egypt, the European Community, France, Greece, Israel, Italy, Lebanon, Libya, Malta, Monaco, Montenegro, Morocco, Slovenia, Spain, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey). Fifteen of them are GEO members.
The proposed system incorporates data from Med Pol (Programme for the assessment and control of pollution of the Mediterranean). It would link information catalogues from participating countries to a central catalogue, via a set of regional nodes, creating a system of systems for sharing environmental metadata.The system, which incorporates GEOSS elements, is still in development (it currently functions using Italian data) and there are obstacles that stand in the way of promoting open sharing of meta-data in the region, explains Nico Bonora, a researcher at the Italian National Institute for Environmental Protection and Research.
“Technologically, the barriers are broken,” says Bonora. However, problems for data sharing crop up when states, often those neighboring Europe, are reticent in making environmental data available, perhaps because it is thought to be confidential. In some cases, the data sets are simply not available.
The proposed system of systems for sharing environmental data in Mediterranean region. Credit: Nico Bonara.
Due to the benefits associated with data tools, March Morlà would like to see universities and research institutions create similar applications. “We hope that in demonstrating the use of the SDIs (Spatial Data Infrastructure), we will be able to encourage people to use and develop their own SDIs in order to share data,” he says.
Researchers have long struggled with the frustrations of not being to able to access certain data sets, either because they are not publicly available, do not exist, or are incomplete. But with Knowseas, O’ Higgins is optimistic about the direction that the future of data sharing could take.
“The opportunities that we are going to have when all these distributed databases are really joined up, and then combining that with the web — the possibilities are very exciting.”
source: http://www.earthzine.org
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