LIFECO: GIS and Spatial Data analysis

This work package is part of the LIFECO programme: LInking hydrographic Frontal activity with the ECOsystem dynamics of the North Sea and Skagerrak - importance to Fish stock recruitment The success of GIS in the management and analysis of land-based spatial data is well-established. While GIS offers a potentially useful assemblage of tools and techniques for summarising and investigating relationships amongst marine data marine GIS implementations are still novel. Two issues that contribute to this slow uptake by the oceanographic and marine community are the 4-dimensional nature of marine data and lack of appropriate analytical routines. These are the two problems that will be addressed specifically by this work package. Researchers working in a multidisciplinary team will share a common platform and suite of tools that are easily accessible and can handle a range of data types for exploratory analysis of combined data sets. A geographic information system (GIS) is proposed as the framework for data analysis and synthesis where the data sets include sampled biological parameters, output from numerical models, historical fields, and satellite imagery and derived products. To this end the GIS and spatial analysis work package aims to: Provide access to a collection of processed satellite images and derived parameters from a variety of sensors and integrate image collection within the GIS environment Develop routines for access, analysis and display of multidisciplinary data; develop routines to explore 4D data in a variety of modes; develop functionality to assist interactive descriptive hypothesis generation, and model validation against other data sets Develop routines to help formalise descriptive hypotheses through development of 2D statistical models.