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The MarineMap Consortium is a group of scientists and geospatial technologists at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB), The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and Ecotrust.
In 2007, the MarineMap Consortium formed to develop geospatial technologies at facilitating marine protected area (MPA) planning in California. The California Marine Life Protection Act Initiative (MLPAI) contracted the MarineMap consortium to develop a web-based decision support system geared toward helping non-technical users (i.e., stakeholders) design MPAs. Consequently, the consortium developed their flagship application, called MarineMap.
The MarineMap Consortium is now working to extend the MarineMap decision support tool to be used by collaborative, participatory and science-based marine planning efforts around the world.
The MarineMap decision support tool is a web-based program for designing marine protected areas (MPAs). In particular, users can (1) view and query a large number of geospatial data layers, (2) draw prospective MPA boundaries, (3) analyze the contents of prospective MPAs, (4) estimate economic impacts of prospective MPAs, (5) assemble MPAs into collections (called "arrays"), (6) share MPAs and arrays with other MarineMap users, (7) assign allowed uses within prospective MPAs, and (9) export MPA shapes to KML and reports to CSV files.
In 2010, the U.S. Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution awarded the Innovation in Technology and Environmental Conflict Resolution to the MarineMap Consortium. [1]
A geographic information system (GIS) is a conceptualized framework that provides the ability to capture and analyze spatial and geographic data. GIS applications are computer-based tools that allow the user to create interactive queries, store and edit spatial and non-spatial data, analyze spatial information output, and visually share the results of these operations by presenting them as maps.
The Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary is a sanctuary off the Pacific coast of Southern California. The National Marine Sanctuary program is administered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Marine protected areas (MPA) are protected areas of seas, oceans, estuaries or in the US, the Great Lakes. These marine areas can come in many forms ranging from wildlife refuges to research facilities. MPAs restrict human activity for a conservation purpose, typically to protect natural or cultural resources. Such marine resources are protected by local, state, territorial, native, regional, national, or international authorities and differ substantially among and between nations. This variation includes different limitations on development, fishing practices, fishing seasons and catch limits, moorings and bans on removing or disrupting marine life. In some situations, MPAs also provide revenue for countries, potentially equal to the income that they would have if they were to grant companies permissions to fish. The value of MPA to mobile species is unknown.
Pennsylvania Spatial Data Access (PASDA) is Pennsylvania's official public access geospatial information clearinghouse. PASDA serves as Pennsylvania's node on the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI). PASDA is a cooperative effort of the Pennsylvania Geospatial Technologies Office of the Office of Information Technology and the Pennsylvania State University Institutes of Energy and the Environment (PSIEE).
The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo), is a non-profit non-governmental organization whose mission is to support and promote the collaborative development of open geospatial technologies and data. The foundation was formed in February 2006 to provide financial, organizational and legal support to the broader Free and open-source geospatial community. It also serves as an independent legal entity to which community members can contribute code, funding and other resources.
Participatory GIS (PGIS) or public participation geographic information system (PPGIS) is a participatory approach to spatial planning and spatial information and communications management.
Geospatial metadata is a type of metadata applicable to geographic data and information. Such objects may be stored in a geographic information system (GIS) or may simply be documents, data-sets, images or other objects, services, or related items that exist in some other native environment but whose features may be appropriate to describe in a (geographic) metadata catalog.
A Web mapping or an online mapping is the process of using the maps delivered by geographic information systems (GIS) on the Internet, more specifically in the World Wide Web (WWW). A web map or an online map is both served and consumed, thus web mapping is more than just web cartography, it is a service by which consumers may choose what the map will show. Web GIS emphasizes geodata processing aspects more involved with design aspects such as data acquisition and server software architecture such as data storage and algorithms, than it does the end-user reports themselves.
The Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) was passed in 1999 and is part of the California Fish and Game Code. The MLPA requires California to reevaluate all existing marine protected areas (MPAs) and potentially design new MPAs that together function as a statewide network. The MLPA has clear guidance associated with the development of this MPA network. MPAs are developed on a regional basis with MLPA and MPA-specific goals in mind and are evaluated over time to assess their effectiveness in meeting these goals. The main six goals of the Marine Life Protection Act are to maintain the diversity of marine ecosystems, conserve its populations, better educate people on human-marine life interactions, protect habitats, and effectively enforce MPAs. The establishment of this policy is an important step in expanding science-based management and decision making regarding policies.
Distributed GIS refers to GI Systems that do not have all of the system components in the same physical location. This could be the processing, the database, the rendering or the user interface. It represents a special case of distributed computing, with examples of distributed systems including web-based GIS and Mobile GIS. Distribution of resources provides corporate and enterprise-based models for GIS. Distributed GIS permits a shared services model, including data fusion based on Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) web services. Distributed GIS technology enables modern online mapping systems, Location-based services (LBS), web-based GIS and numerous map-enabled applications. Other applications include transportation, logistics, utilities, farm / agricultural information systems, real-time environmental information systems and the analysis of the movement of people. In terms of data, the concept has been extended to include volunteered geographical information. Distributed processing allows improvements to the performance of spatial analysis through the use of techniques such as parallel processing.
The Conservation Geoportal was an online geoportal, intended to provide a comprehensive listing of geographic information systems (GIS) datasets and web map service relevant to biodiversity conservation. It is currently defunct. The site, its contents and functionality were free for anyone to use and contribute to. The Conservation Geoportal was launched on June 28, 2006 at the joint Society for Conservation Biology and Society for Conservation GIS Conference in San Jose, California, USA. As of October 2007, it included metadata for over 3,667 GIS records.
Marine spatial planning (MSP) is a process that brings together multiple users of the ocean – including energy, industry, government, conservation and recreation – to make informed and coordinated decisions about how to use marine resources sustainably. MSP generally uses maps to create a more comprehensive picture of a marine area – identifying where and how an ocean area is being used and what natural resources and habitat exist. It is similar to land-use planning, but for marine waters.
The Barrow Area Information Database (BAID) is designed to support Arctic science with a special focus on the research hubs of Barrow, Atqasuk and Ivotuk on the North Slope of Alaska.
Geographic information systems (GIS) play a constantly evolving role in geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) and United States national security. These technologies allow a user to efficiently manage, analyze, and produce geospatial data, to combine GEOINT with other forms of intelligence collection, and to perform highly developed analysis and visual production of geospatial data. Therefore, GIS produces up-to-date and more reliable GEOINT to reduce uncertainty for a decisionmaker. Since GIS programs are Web-enabled, a user can constantly work with a decision maker to solve their GEOINT and national security related problems from anywhere in the world. There are many types of GIS software used in GEOINT and national security, such as Google Earth, ERDAS IMAGINE, GeoNetwork opensource, and Esri ArcGIS.
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), an international voluntary consensus standards organization, originated in 1994. In the OGC, more than 500 commercial, governmental, nonprofit and research organizations worldwide collaborate in a consensus process encouraging development and implementation of open standards for geospatial content and services, sensor web and Internet of Things, GIS data processing and data sharing.
The LANDFIRE Program produces geo-spatial products and databases covering the United States of America. LANDFIRE is a partnership between the wildland fire management programs of the United States Department of Interior, the USDA Forest Service and the Nature Conservancy. LANDFIRE was chartered to create a nationally complete, comprehensive, and consistent set of products that support cross-country planning, and fire and natural resource management. This multi-partner Program produces consistent, comprehensive, geospatial data and databases that describe vegetation, wildland fuel, and fire regimes across the United States and insular areas. LANDFIRE's mission is to provide agency leaders and managers with a common "all-lands" data set of vegetation and wildland fire/fuels information for strategic fire and resource management planning and analysis.
WorldMap is a web platform for creating, displaying, analyzing, and searching spatial data and other data forms across multiple disciplines.
GeoSUR is a regional initiative led by spatial data producers in Latin America and the Caribbean to implement a regional geospatial network and to help establish the basis of a spatial data infrastructure in the region. GeoSUR supports the development of free access geographic services useful to find, view and analyze spatial information through maps, satellite images, and geographic data.
ProtectedSeas is a marine conservation organization associated with the Anthropocene Institute. The group is working to develop a visual database in map form of every marine protected area (MPA) in the world as well as deploy new radar systems to protect vulnerable areas from illegal activity. The project is headquartered in California.
