Fisheries, Aquaculture and Marine Ecosystems

 

 

Franck Magron, SPC Reef Fisheries Information Manager, was there to present the ‘Sensor Web Enablement for the Pacific’ and SPC plans to share sensor data in relation to climate change monitoring. SPC’s Coastal Fisheries Programme is working on this issue with funding from two regional projects: the European Union-funded SciCOFish (Scientific Support for the Management of Coastal and Oceanic Fisheries in the Pacific Islands Region) and the AusAID-funded ‘Vulnerability and adaptation of coastal fisheries to climate change’ project.

 

More and more environmental data is acquired in the Pacific through loggers and real-time sensors. SPC, for example, is deploying scientific-grade temperature loggers in some pilot sites for long-term monitoring of sea surface temperature in reef areas that will be regularly resurveyed through habitat and resource assessments. The temperature data will be made freely available on SPC’s website starting in 2011.

 

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Sharing the sensor observation data across organisations and disciplines is important, especially for multi-sectoral projects such as climate change monitoring and mitigation or disaster risk reduction.

 

With this objective, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) working group has developed standards to define how to describe sensors and associated metadata (Sensor Model Language - SensorML), a communication protocol to allow querying and retrieval of sensor data (Sensor Observation Service - SOS) and a system to receive alerts from sensors when a specific event occur (Sensor Alert Service – SAS).

 

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In his presentation Mr Magron described the new standards, their current implementation by data providers (such as the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Integrated Ocean Observing System) and GIS software, and SPC’s plans to adopt them to share climate change-related data.

 

While participants understood the need for sharing and long-term storage of sensor data (and associated metadata), it was noted that the standards presented probably will not be adopted until they are fully supported by tools made available to potential users. During his presentation, Mr Magron explained that the release of version 2.0 of the standards could stimulate their implementation by software developers and ease their adoption by users.

 

 

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For more information, please contact Franck Magron, SPC Reef Fisheries Information Manager.

 

Last Updated on Friday, 30 November 2012 09:36
 

 


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