ICAN Atlas Assessment Working Group
Click here to take the Coastal Web Atlas User Survey
This working group is concerned with assessing how coastal web atlases (CWAs) are used by different user communities, and if user expectations are being met. It is therefore important that efforts are made to ascertain and, where possible, quantify, the impact of CWAs. This can be furthered by:
- Carrying out a comprehensive baseline inventory of existing coastal atlases and their functionality,
- Articulating the benefits of atlas semantic interoperability for users.
An initial inventory of U.S. coastal web atlases was conducted by the NOAA Coastal Services Center (Gabe Sataloff, Randy Warren, Tony LaVoi) in the summer/fall of 2008. The document 2_Oct_Coastal_Atlas_Research_Summary.doc is a summary of this preliminary research to date. An effort was made to start with the official state CZM program and look for online mapping resources. If none were found there, the search was broadened although clearly not exhaustive given time and resources. Not surprisingly, there is almost no consistency from state to state. NOAA CSC is maintaining an Excel document with more detail on each online resource identified.
Group Documents
30 January 2009 New Web-based User Survey here
22 January 2009 Updated User Survey here
21 January 2009 Updated Developer Survey here
11 December 2008 Conference Call: Latest revision to Developer Survey Questions [15Dec08, .doc]
Initial 29 October 2008 Conference Call: notes.txt and notes.doc
20 November 2008 Conference Call: U.S. Atlas Inventory [xls] | User Survey Questions, [21Nov08, .doc]
Notes
From Gabe Sataloff, NOAA CSC:
-Marcia will add in some final touches, including job sector and job role in the "General" section. Language will be adjusted to create more "closed-ended" questions where possible. A paragraph will be added to the beginning of the survey asking users to take it at the end of their experience with the atlas.
-The big push now is to develop relationships with atlas developers. Please update the atlas inventory and send to Gabe for new atlases found.
-Is there anyone from the Gulf of Mexico or Northeast who could serve as a regional Point of contact?
-Tanya will put together a working draft of a developer survey and send it out for review by the end of November. Please indicate times you are available for a conference call the first two weeks of Dec. on the Doodle calendar.
From Tanya Haddad, Oregon Coastal Management Program:
West Coast Coastal Web Atlas Discussion
Kathy T. kicked things off with a round of introductions, and then we launched into a roundtable of each participant’s CWA project following along the general outline of:
- what each CWA has (major content areas)
- what each CWA has in progress (current behind the scenes work)
- what each CWA has on their wish list
Washington (Kathy & Liz)
- Existing: Multiple large datasets including several years of Land cover, and various coastal planning data coving physical, biological, jurisdictional and infrastructure information. Also a very popular oblique aerial photography application, as well as historic aerial photo archive.
- Current Work: NOAA fellow Deborah Purce is working on a Public Shoreline Access inventory for the WA Coastal Atlas
- Desired Future topics: much more in the Marine / benthic habitat realm.
- Technology: ArcIMS site
- URL: http://www.ecy.wa.gov/programs/sea/sma/atlas_home.html
British Columbia (Brad)
- Exisiting: lots of intertidal data, particularly eelgrass mapping, as well as connection to field tools and map / data upload tools for data harmonization and increasing the holdings of the data catalog. Non-profit integrative website, utilizes a lot of volunteer labor to compile data. A few sub projects focus on land use planning and shoreline assessment information (Fraser and Berard (sp?) inlets).
- Ongoing and Future Work: working on compiling more volunteer derived data as well as extensive video surveys, photos etc.
- Technology: Autodesk Mapguide (requires plug-in), transitioning to Autodesk Open source product
- URL: http://cmnbc.ca/atlas_gallery/pacific-coastal-resources-atlas-british-co...
Oregon (Tanya)
- Existing: Various basic system data for estuarine, littoral and rocky areas, as well as hosting of coastal management related datasets such as Public shoreline access inventory and Beach water quality monitoring results data.
- Current work: focused on marine spatial planning data collection and integration. A second project is performing a re-inventory of shoreline public access status, including expansion of scope to include both beach and estuarine access.
- Desired Future topics: aerial oblique tool and Shorezone-like product.
- Technology: Primarily open source UMN Mapserver
- URL: http://www.coastalatlas.net
Alaska (Steve and Gina)
- Existing: Shorezone 1 second bit caps (?) 4000+ kilometers of coastal geomorphology units with attribution and photography. Site allows data extraction / download.
- Technology: Currently the product is ArcIMS based but future plans are to move to ArcServer, with the intent to be able to capitalize on spatial analysis capabilities.
- URL: http://mapping.fakr.noaa.gov/Website/ShoreZone/viewer.htm
California (Becky S.)
- Existing: Ceres product is California wide data protal for GIS. California Coastal Commission also has a public access product that they are transitioning to digital form. Also the California MPA process has assembled a wide suite of marine related data in an online decision support tool.
- Future: John Helly / Scripts has an initiative to create an umbrella California Atlas that is just getting off the ground (and seeking NSF funding). No one from this effort was on the call but John shared some information about the direction that project is headed via email.
- URL: various
The Nature Conservancy (Gina)
- Existing: For the 14 ecoregions in our region The Nature Conservancy currently has 9 assessments at some level. The assessments and take in a wide variety of marine habitat, species and human use datasets, and the products involve a peer review component.
- Current & Future work: Five ecoregional assessments have been completed and 4 are on-going / underway.
- Technology: the TNC assesments employ the decision support tool MARXAN
- URL : http:// conserveonline.org/coldocs/2007/02/PNW Coast EA Maps_Final_Jan3_lowres.pdf
BC Marine Conservation Analysis (MCA)
- Existing: Approach is similar to TNC analysis described above. Methodology and target lists have been shared, and MARXAN is employed. Outputs include hard copy maps for peer review and PDF products. Some data inputs can also be made available. Particular interest in looking at high value marine areas, and high value human use areas and the corresponding overlaps between these two.
- URL:
NOAA (Becky S.)
- Existing: Multipurpose marine Cadastre project includes all MMS lease track information and information related to alternative energy siting decisions. Will eventually also include NMFS biological data.
- In progress: Legislative Atlas including summary of all major map able federal and state laws for coastal and marine areas. West coast states (WA, OR, CA) are in progress and targeted for completion in fall 2009.
- Future Work: West Coast Governors Agreement has given priority to tri-coast (WA, OR, CA) bathymetric mapping, and may also lead to other topic areas of collaboration.
Note:The ICAN 3 workshop included a short introduction to the West Coast Governors' Agreement, as well as the new Pacific Coast Collaborative Agreement (Alaska, B.C., California, Oregon, and Washington)
- URL: http://www.csc.noaa.gov/mbwg/htm/multipurpose.html
- URL: http://www.csc.noaa.gov/digitalcoast/tools/legatlas.html
BC CRIM (missed speaker name)
- Existing: shoreline biobanding and other coastal resource data, as well as "GeoAnimator" product that allows browsing of video surveys (GeoAnimator is currently broken due to a server transition). Also hosting Pacific COIN project prototype - Coastal Ocean Information Network, which is a WMS that has an Atlantic analog. This project has not yet moved beyond the prototype phase.
- Technology: ArcIMS based.
- URL: http://ilmbwww.gov.bc.ca/cis/coastal/others/crimsindex.htm
Fisheries and Oceans Canada - Oceans Initiative (missed speaker name)
- Existing: Pacific Northwest Coast Integrated Management Area (PNCIMA) initiative contains 1000+ pages of reports on coastal/marine uses w/ lots of mapped data.
- Current & Future: Working on making a static PDF based atlas from these products that will contain approximately 60 maps with 100+ layers for planning purposes. The Mapster IMS project currently displays some of this data online.
-Technology: Mapster is ArcIMS based.
- URL: http://www-heb.pac.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/maps/maps-data_e.htm
*************************
After the round table Kathy opened a broader discussion, across several topics:
Data sharing wish list:
- Benthic mapping information
• Oregon worked on a project last fall in conjunction with OSU to digitize historic lithology samples in an effort to improve the picture they have of the surface lithology in the Oregon Territorial Sea.
• OSU (Chris Goldfinger Lab) is currently taking this same methodology up to Washington's coast.
• TNC has worked on integrating these data into the existing benthic maps and edgematching between WA, OR and CA data sets.
• BC has the tools to aquire excellent sidescan products, but not much of a budget to do the aquiring, so this effort will take years.
- Wide-ranging Marine Mammals
• Oregon does not have much information beyond some TS haulout/colony data and what can be gleaned from searching for accessible federal data source.
• WA F&W has bird and Salmon databases, but no mammal data
• BC is working on a database of Killer Whale sightings and would like to generate critical habitat maps for Orca especially in the southern regions, so opportunity for collaboration w/ WA on this topic.
- Invasive Species
• NOAA Fisheries has Green Crab data
• WA DNR has a big Spartina tracking / eradication program
• OR is lacking in this area
Other opportunities for data sharing:
- Washington sees opportunities to share on Landcover and Drift cells
- BC sees an opportunity to share on mapping methods, trends, and data harmonization (e.g. for Eelgrass data)
- There is also a Pacific region Contaminants Atlas for BC & Yukon coastline that is a searchable contaminants database that returns geographic output. It would be great to expand this to a coast-wide contaminants information resource.
Other opportunities for sharing non-data experiences:
- Brad: there is a big need for post- Atlas rollout education and user training, including audience follow-up and feedback into the product. Any sharing along those lines would be great (ditto Kathy).
- Darby: the "techies" out there also have an interest in learning from each other's technology approaches and solutions to common problems. (Ditto Tanya).
******************************
Workshop / Networking Opportunity?
It would be great to work on an in-person meeting at some point (perhaps spring?) to share our work and learn from each other face to face. Travel restrictions might make this difficult for some entities, so in the interim we could look at utlizing WebEx to do some demonstrations online (NOAA has this capability to lend). Washington would be interested in hosting the in-person meeting if it can be pulled together, and NOAA in Seattle has a venue that might be appropriate.
