ArcView Supports Deep Sea Research with Famous Submersible

This paper describes the pioneering use of a GIS aboard a deep sea oceanographic research vessel, in concert with the ALVIN diving submersible, to explore and map sites along a seafloor spreading center in the Northeast Pacific Ocean. Integrated, multidisciplinary datasets of three hydrothermally active regions of the Juan de Fuca Ridge were available at sea for two ALVIN dive programs during the summer of 1995. ALVIN was used to carry out extensive, integrated sampling of features that were discovered and mapped on previous expeditions to the study area. The use of a GIS played a major role in optimizing the limited time spent on bottom with ALVIN by providing detailed and accurate pre-dive maps of important hydrothermal and geological features for all the proposed dive areas. GIS operations were also valuable post-dive in providing maps of dive tracklines and sample locations in relation to geological features, and in assessing their navigational accuracy. Newly-acquired submersible tracklines, sample locations, marker deployments and rock core locations were added to the database at sea. One of the surprising aspects of the introduction of any new technology to a discipline is the way in which it creates new perspectives and methodologies, rather than merely automating the "old way of doing things. Based on the success of the '95 expeditions, and given the funding and logistical feasibility, it is hoped that GIS operations will someday become a standard component of oceanographic research with deep-sea submersibles.

Integration and Distribution of Deep Sea Oceanographic Data From the Northeast Pacific using ArcInfo and ArcView

The VENTS Program of NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory is an interdisciplinary research initiative that brings together scientists from a wide range of disciplines, including geophysics, geology, physical oceanography, chemistry, and biology. Researchers within that group studying the Juan de Fuca Ridge seafloor spreading center off the coast of Oregon and Washington have discovered that there is tremendous insight to be gained through the comparison of interdisciplinary databases in a graphic, interactive environment. This is what prompted, in 1993, the design and development of a comprehensive Juan de Fuca Ridge GIS using ArcInfo and ArcView software. The interest in the VENTS GIS has been instantaneous due to a large community of scientists outside of NOAA working on similar Juan de Fuca Ridge problems. NOAA's expectation is that the basic architecture and approach developed by the VENTS program will be extended to the broader scientific community, making the GIS not only an analysis tool, but also a conduit for data exchange and scientific discourse. They envision a distributed database system, with individual data sets residing with the scientists who collected the data, but with all data products made network-accessible to all participants. This paper presents the results of our ongoing efforts in scientific information management and in the display and distribution of Juan de Fuca Ridge data through the World Wide Web using an interactive link to ArcView.

Florida Keys Ecosystem Monitoring Inventory Project

The Florida Keys Ecosystem Monitoring Analysis System is an Arc View-based, desktop geographic information system (GIS) being developed jointly by NOAA's National Ocean Service and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection's Florida Marine Research Institute. The information contained in this system was collected through a series of on-site interviews with the principal investigators for each monitoring project. Metadata collected during these site visits was entered via the Internet into an Oracle database using a forms-capable browser such as Netscape or Mosaic. This system provides a user-friendly, menu-driver GIS for regional managers in the Florida Keys marine ecosystem. It is structured into a series of windows to allow users to query information by:

1. Location (i.e., what types of programs are monitoring in seagrass communities)
2. Theme (i.e., what programs are monitoring for marine mammals)
3. Time (i.e., which programs monitor during the summer months)
4. Other combination (i.e., which programs are monitoring in seagrass communities for epiphytes during summer months).

COMPAS - Coastal Ocean Management, Planning, and Assessment System

COMPAS is a desktop GIS used for coastal resource management and is made possible through a unique Federal, State, and private-sector partnership. COMPAS is a versatile, user-defined system which is designed to provide state and local managers with easy-to-use query, mapping, and analytical capabilities. The current prototype version of COMPAS being developed in North Carolina uses ArcView 3. This reflects dramatic evolutionary development of the system from the Macintosh-HyperCard-MapMaker version of COMPAS initially developed. COMPAS NC will be the prototype for improving the current national oil spill planning and assessment capabilities by providing access to digital Environmental Sensitivity Index (ESI) maps, robust estuarine and marine invertebrate and fish distributions (including ELMR), and other coastal resource data. Example system feature include: a user-friendly system, generation of ESI maps and tables, comparison of coastal resources in different areas, and custom spatial and temporal analyses. Partners in this work include NOAA's ORCA and the Coastal Services Center, the Florida Marine Research Institute, environmental agencies from North Carolina, the Environmental Systems Research Institute, and the Research and Planning Inc. It is anticipated that this project will complement the Gulf-wide Information System (GWIS) under development by the Minerals Management Service for oil spill contingency planning in the Gulf of Mexico.