Ecosystem Approach Community of Practice: AquaMaps

Product

The AquaMaps VREVirtual Research Environment. is available in the iMarine infrastructure and is used by consortium partner FIN to generate and validate marine animal species distribution and biodiversity maps. It is built around the AquaMaps algorithm, and organizes data, computational resources, and output. Only registered users have access to the VREVirtual Research Environment. and the maps, tabular data, and OGC compliant layers produced using the VREVirtual Research Environment..

Priority to CoPCommunity of Practice.

List proposed solution priority following the iMarine Board priority setting criteria:

• The target community is everybody in need of marine animal species distribution and biodiversity maps.
• The VREVirtual Research Environment. users are separated in 3 categories, with different access and processing grants;

1. VREVirtual Research Environment. Managers; responsible for user and resource management.
2. VREVirtual Research Environment. Data managers; responsible for the management of data sets to be used by the algorithm, running the batch processes and persisting results.
3. VREVirtual Research Environment. Users; responsible for the generation of individual maps, batches of maps, and sharing their results from the infrastructure.

• The potential for co-funding has not thoroughly been investigated. However, the positioning of AM in a more generic context, with more datasets, algorithms and metadata management options has been discussed, and met with reasonable interest.
• Structural allocation of resources; FIN resources, together with CNR have been allocated.
• Referred in DoW; Yes.
• Business Cases; BC2.
• The proposed action supports sustainability aspects in the biodiversity community by equipping them with a powerful infrastructure that takes the serve management and maintenance from them. This also frees their time to dedicate to biodiversity research.
• With AM, the products have now become more compliant with OGC standards, and can also be accessed through dedicated geospatial software.
• The AM VREVirtual Research Environment. was instrumental in establishing a versatile and flexible set of components that enriched the infrastructure:
  • Re-usability – Components developed for AquaMaps are already re-used to establish cost-effective solutions for biodiversity and geospatial data management.
  • The benefits – developing AquaMaps thus not only benefited the EA-CoPCommunity of Practice. through improved data products, but also the infrastructure that has now more components on offer.
  • The compatibility of the solution - the AquaMaps components use mainly OGC compliant geospatial services, and all data produced are thus compatible with de-facto geospatial standards. The same is true for the data (Darwin Core) and database (Postgres)

Parentage

Relation to CoPCommunity of Practice. Software

The solution was built in close collaboration with the FIN / AquaMaps team, and replaces the CoPCommunity of Practice. software.

Relation to D4S technologies

AquaMaps was built using the D4ScienceAn e-Infrastructure operated by the D4Science.org initiative. platform and resulted in the development of several key services, such as for ecological modeling, species discovery, and geoexplorer.

Productivity

Are the proposed measures effective? Yes; the re-usability of the components, the reproducibility of the processes, and the extended metadata all point towards a much improved and effective data generation platform.

Does it reduce a known workload? Yes; individual scientist can quickly generate and assess species maps, while the batch processes have reduced generation time from weeks to days.

Presentation

How must the component be delivered to users? (UI Design / on-line help / training material / support)

This is described elsewhere, as the solution is already advanced.

Policy

Are there any policies available that describe data access and sharing?

Yes

Have the Copyright / attribution / metadata / legal aspects been addressed from a user and technology perspective?

Yes.