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(Submission #19)
A well-advised and common approach to Nature Conservation requires several different organisations and governmental departments across Europe to work together to collect, consolidate and share key conservation information. The urgency and need for real-time and up-to-date data to be quickly and easily accessed by a wide audience, each with its own needs, only serves to add a further level of complexity.
The establishment of Natura 2000 and the new transboundary EU approach for protected sites management has enforced the link between nature conservation and geo-information. This has generated the need for interoperable, accessible and harmonised datasets for the EU. The link is also addressed by the INSPIRE Directive which pursues an EU Spatial Data Infrastructure to support environmental policies.
Whilst INSPIRE compliance will result in interoperable and standardised data sharing; the road to INSPIRE compliance for Nature Conservation is not without its obstacles. The Nature-SDIplus project is just one such example of a European project working to overcome challenges and achieve best practice for INSPIRE.
Key data challenges facing Nature Conservation
* Protected Sites source data held in non-conformant format (e.g. SHP)
* INSPIRE requires the creation of previously uncaptured data (e.g. ‘Owner’ label)
* Cross boundary working means different coordinate reference systems in use
* Publication of sensitive data (e.g. location of rare species)
* Multilingual and multicultural audience
This paper demonstrates how partners of the Nature-SDI project overcame these objectives, even achieving results in excess of the original requirements by utilising standards based, commercial-off-the-shelf data transformation tools to perform Data Harmonisation and Data Publication (via web services).
Through addressing both data harmonisation and data delivery, conservation data can be published and shared to local, national or international geoportals, resulting in a common understanding being widely and easily accessible in a standard and INSPIRE compliant format.
Submission Type: Oral Presentation proposal Submission Category: Trans-national SDI projects (including EU (co-)funded projects)
[Abstract (PDF)]
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