Geospatial cluster
The iMarine Geospatial Cluster activities revolve around the following principle: Enrichment of Species Occurrences data with profiles of environmental parameters
Executive Summary
The iMarine Geospatial Cluster is aimed at organizing collections of requirements gathered from the iMarine Business cases (EU Common Fishery Policy, FAO deep seas fisheries programme, and the UN EAF Ecosystem Approach to fisheries) and at providing infrastructure implementation recommendations. These recommendations are primarily intended for the iMarine project partners and the Communities of Practice (CoPCommunity of Practice.) identified within the Ecosystem Approach.
Introduction and Background (The Problems)
“For many biological observations, we have no data on the prevailing environmental conditions; either this information was never recorded (as is the case for many museum specimens, especially older ones), or the data was collected, but by others than the biologists, and different data streams were never re-united. Digging though archives of sampling campaigns of many years ago is tedious, if not impossible, by loss of essential information on the sampling event”.
Edward Vanden Berghe, Executive Director, Ocean Biogeographic Information System, April 2012
Environmental conditions such as salinity, temperature, or acidity, … are essential for conducting studies and developing applications related to Marine Species Distributions. Nevertheless, it is still a tedious task to collect and present coherently such parameters to the scientists. Through the activities of its Geospatial Cluster, the iMarine project is developing an approach and infrastructure tools in order to tackle this issue. Such activities aim at leveraging the spatial and temporal dimensions of environmental measurements, both being the bridges that can join environmental variables with the current assessments on species occurrences.
Way forward
Oceanographers have created large archives of data, the majority of them publicly accessible. Some examples discussed or assessed within the iMarine project:
- The OBIS Ocean Biog
