Serge Scory, Mia Devolder, Nabil Youdjou & Laurence Vigin
Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, Biodiversity and Ecosystems Data and Information Centre
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Introduction

The Belgian part of the North Sea is one of the most intensively used sea area in the world. Shipping, tourism, fisheries, sand exploitation, windmills…, all these activities make use of what the sea has to offer. However, this busyness causes high pressure. Several activities may be in each other’s hair and may also have an impact on the environment. In order to make this all balance, the Belgian Minister for the North Sea took the initiative to define a marine spatial plan. After months of intensive preparatory work, expert consultation and stakeholder participation, a Royal Decree “establishing the spatial use of the Belgian part of the North Sea” for the period 2014-2020, was published in March 2014.

The implementation of this plan is the mission of the federal ministry of the environment, in charge of the North Sea policy (Marine Environment service of the FPS “Health, Food Chain Safety and Environment”). The Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS), a federal scientific institution, provides scientific and technical support to the Marine Environment service. It is in this context that RBINS experts in geographical science and information technology offered to create a dedicated web portal for the Belgian marine geo–referenced information.

Objectives and specifications

The portal aims at:

• becoming a single stop shop for Belgian marine geo–referenced data,
• ensuring compliancy with applicable EU directives (e.g. the “INSPIRE” directive, the directive “establishing a framework for maritime spatial planning”),
• acting as online reference resource, both for national and international needs,
• addressing the needs of as many categories of users as possible.

The portal was built with the following specifications in mind:

• a clear and re–usable data processing workflow had to be established,
• a versatile IT architecture should be built,
• the portal should allow submission and/or publication of data and metadata by other administrations.

Implementation

These requirements were met by using the following, well–established, open–source software (Figure 2):

• PostgreSQL,
• PostGIS,
• Geoserver, and
• Geonetwork.

Thanks to the use of standard formats and specifications, the data providers do not need to modify their own workflow for producing the layers. In our own workflow, for example, both QGIS and ArcGIS are used.

Downstream, the geographical information is provided in several formats via several interfaces:

• Ready–to-use maps (e.g. png images),
• Embedded viewer,
• Keyhole Markup Language (KML) files,
• Shapefiles,
• WMF, WMS, …

The human user is able to easily browse the available datasets, (pre-)view them and download the selected information. Corresponding functions, offered as "web-services" allow incorporating the available information into complex and distributed applications.

Content

Currently, only the zones were general or specific regulatory regimes apply, as defined in the marine spatial plan, are published. The following topics (mainly related to human activities) are covered:

• Nature conservation,
• Fisheries,
• Aquaculture,
• Shipping and dredging,
• Coastal protection,
• Sand and gravel extraction,
• Energy production areas, cables and pipelines,
• Military use,
• Scientific research, poles, radars, …

This geographical information forms the legal background of all human activities in the Belgian part of the North Sea (see Figure 1 on page 1). In other words, it doesn’t provide information on where such activities actually take place, nor their intensity or other characteristics.

Quality control issues

The importance of having a good work flow appeared clearly during the preparatory phase, especially the steps dealing with the quality control of the data. Although the geographical information published in the Belgian Official Gazette were deemed satisfactory by the authors of the plan, the digitization of the corresponding geographical features revealed several flaws that had to be corrected. For instance, for the definition of zones adjacent to the coastline they assumed an implicit closure of their polygon (in fact their polyline) by the coastline. Topological rigour is of course incompatible with implicit assumptions. Our corrections sometimes resulted in modifications of the decree in order to be legally, topologically and geographically consistent.

One of the biggest difficulties to solve when writing these corrigenda was to take into account that our reference coastline is “moving”. Indeed the Belgian coast is sandy and exposed to strong tidal currents (up to 1.5 m/s), what makes its morphology rapidly evolve at some places. Consequently the nautical charts are updated every 18 months.  But the legal definition of the Belgian territorial waters (and, hence, of the full Belgian maritime domain) explicitly refers to the coastline “as depicted on large scale nautical charts”. Therefore, a rather complex (at least as seen by lawyers) topological formulation had to be found for defining locations “on” the coastline, in order to avoid publishing a new decree every one and a half years.

Compliancy with the INSPIRE directive

MarineAtlas.be aims at becoming the marine node of the federal geo-platform being implemented by the Belgian National Geographical Institute. Once this node and the infrastructure will be available, it will be much easier for the Belgian federal administrations to comply with the implementation of the INSPIRE directive and the international obligations that already require INSPIRE-compliancy, e.g. Marine Strategy Framework Directive, Marine Spatial Planning directive, EIOnet reporting... Our main tool for being compliant is the Geonetwork server. The metadata corresponding to the various published layers are progressively made available in conformity with the metadata ISO 19115 standard.

Languages

The web interface and the metadata are available in three languages: Dutch, French and English. However, the content that has a legal scope is given in English for informative purpose only, the official reference being the information provided in the Belgian official languages, Dutch and French (no official version in German being available for the moment). 

Next steps

Content–wise, we intend to populate the web portal along four axes:

“Document what exists”: as aforesaid, the marine spatial plan defines zones where human activities are allowed, most of the time under specific conditions. Such activities (except for aquaculture) already take place. Concessions have been granted for wind farms and 182 windmills are already operational. The location and characteristics of these industrial facilities (according to the INSPIRE classification) will be published soon. Likewise, cables and pipelines were already laid down in the reserved corridors and we will also publish their coordinates “as laid”.

“Quantify what happens”: gravel is being extracted in the authorized sectors, sand and mud is extracted in the harbour channels and dumped in the designated areas, energy is being produced… All this results in quantities and statistics that will be turned into layers, thanks  to the help of the other competent federal administrations (Economy, Mobility, …).

“Inform on the environmental status”: bound, like any EU Member State, by the “Marine Strategy Framework Directive”, Belgium has defined indicators of the environmental status of its maritime domain and is developing a programme of measures for achieving a “Good Environmental Status” by 2020. A monitoring programme is now in place, under the responsibility of RBINS. The scientific results of this monitoring programme and the evolution of the indicators they support will be published on the portal.

“Publish scientific knowledge”: RBINS has a long oceanographic tradition. Its researchers are active in physical and chemical oceanography. They perform intensive studies on the biodiversity of the North Sea, with a multi–disciplinary (aka “ecosystem”) approach. The accumulated knowledge will be translated into synthetic layers e.g.: TS-climatologies, tidal currents patterns, swell energy, sediment dynamics, habitat mapping, contaminants distribution …

Regarding the features of the portal, we will mainly focus on the improvement of our embedded browser, which at the early stage of development.

Conclusion

The publication of the official Belgian marine spatial plan, well in advance of the obligations set by the EU Directive on Marine spatial planning and together with the mandatory implementation of the INSPIRE directive, offered not–to–miss leverage to initiate a marine geographical information portal at the Belgian federal level. Although means were limited the legal background information is now available in various formats and through various protocols. The development team has set plans for upcoming improvements but will happily appreciate any feedback from users and experts to steer their efforts.

Acknowledgements

The Geocell team of RBINS wants to thank Fabrice Ovidio and Samuli Kauranne (SWAP, Scientific Web sites and Applications, RBINS) for publishing the web portal, Marc Roche and Koen Degrendele (FPS Economy) for their challenging use of our data in their Google Earth application and the Marine Environment service of the FPS “Health, Food Chain Safety and Environment” for their financial support and their understanding when we asked them to change the legal texts.