Developing tools for ecosystem management: identification of sensitive and essential / preferred fish habitat

A challenge exists to optimise systems for the management of data generated and derived in the process of classifying CWC habitats.  A variety of datasets will be generated and derived including high resolution multibeam bathymetric and backscatter imagery and other products, benthic and species data, high frequency side-scan sonar data, sub-bottom profile data, oceanographic data and video imagery.

A key issue pertaining to data access relates to the availability of long term database environments for scientists to publish, retrieve and archive quality data and metadata. This issue is addressed in CoralFISH by adopting PANGAEA (Publishing Network for Geoscientific and Environmental Data) as the core project repository framework for storing and distributing project generated geo-referenced data. Data can be retrieved by the PANGAEA search engine and a number of OGC and ISO compliant interfaces.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is an important tool for the integration, analysis and visualisation of marine data.  GIS can facilitate dynamic links between different models and analytical processes.  As such it is considered to hold the key to better management and of the numerous spatially related problems identified by fisheries scientists. 

Opportunities presented by existing applications of GIS in general fisheries management include some specific areas that can be of relevance to CoralFISH, e.g. integration of regional surveys, statistical and species life history data. Depending on the availability and quality of the latter, this can lead to seasonal mapping of species population dynamics and, in particular, highlight areas of habitat vulnerability.

CoralFISH provides an opportunity to make progress on many of these issues. In particular, advances will be made in simulating relationships between fish distribution and abundance, and environmental parameters at the meso CWC habitat level.  Fisheries contour maps will be generated and innovative techniques will be identified to integrate this data with habitat models to provide a basis for trend analysis.

The CoralFISH approach builds on a number of previous projects which have made significant advances in the area of data sharing and integration for marine environmental datasets.  CoralFISH will incorporate the OGC Web Map Service (WMS).  WMS will be utilised here for data visualisation, facilitating the development of an online fisheries and habitat atlas. The webGIS envisioned from this work task will be targeted towards fisheries management applications and an end user community including scientists and policy makers with an interest in ecosystem interactions.  Novel geo-visualisation techniques will be developed to assist in delineation of geo-management areas. 

Objectives

• To identify, develop, optimise and apply integrated geostatistical techniques within a GIS framework as tools to facilitate ecosystem management
• To apply these tools to facilitate identification of essential and preferred fish habitats with reference to CWC
• To enable production and web dissemination of habitat vulnerability atlases with utility at various end user scales