Friday, January 18, 2008

New Resource Provides Marine and Coastal Zone Data

A major new online resource which makes available marine and coastal zone digital data from SeaZone Solutions Ltd was launched today. The maps and data Marine Digimap delivers provide a fascinating insight into the broad range of factors that make up the marine and coastal environment and influence its exploitation.

The new resource, made available by JISC Collections through EDINA’s Digimap platform, is very timely. The Marine Bill White Paper published last year and a forthcoming Climate Change Bill demonstrate the ever increasing concern over flooding and rising sea level which makes access to quality information about marine and coastal environments more important than ever.

Marine Digimap includes raster marine maps of various scales and detail (derived from Admiralty Charts), which are ideal for back-drop mapping in the UK coastal zone, and Hydrospatial, a vector thematic marine data product suitable for advanced spatial analysis and customised mapping. Users will be able to view maps through their web browser, save maps for printing and download the map data for use in geographical information systems.

The Hydrospatial product includes key geographical information on the UK marine and coastal zone environment provided as six logically structured Topic Layers. This includes data on: the nature and shape of the earth’s surface on land and under the sea; marine biological, physical and chemical features; man-made physical structures and obstructions; socio economic information (for example, aquaculture, fisheries, and transportation routes); conservation areas and data on tides and currents.

The Digimap Collections enable research projects that would otherwise be arduous, time consuming or even impossible by delivering the key base data which form the foundation for research and teaching. Although, geology, land-based (topographic) and marine data will be used separately by many, research and teaching on the coastal zone, requires all these data.

Source : http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/

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