HabitatSpace – GIS based tools for marine habitat delineation and marine spatial planning

Societal impacts consider the possible impacts of climate change on human societies. While these are critical impacts, non-human organisms are also affected by climate change. This talk will describe tools we have created to delineate oceanic habitats – especially pelagic habitats – in support of ecosystem-based management and marine spatial planning. These tools can be used to explore the impacts of climate change on marine organisms and ecosystems.

HabitatSpace provides both analysis and visualization in a GIS-based tool that uses UCAR's Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) for volumetric visualizations. While visualization tools provide appealing pictures of complicated data, they can also be coupled with geographic information systems to provide advanced analyses. This presentation will focus on recent developments in interoperability, such as the direct ingestion of netCDF data in ArcGIS and the use of Java tools for data analysis, and how these developments enhance our ability to represent multidimensional data in GIS. The analysis of both in situ and model data will be presented.

New tools for the representation of multidimensional data allow user to visualize and interact with datasets such as three-dimensional output from particle tracking models. These tools can also be used to analyze conductivity-temperature-depth (CTD) data, which is the oceanographic analog to atmospheric sounding data. Examples from projects for the National Marine Fisheries Service and the efforts of the Atmospheric Data Model team working with ESRI will be shown.