Arctic Coastal and Marine Environmental Monitoring
165
number of Russian institutes have large amounts of data from these Arctic areas,
describing bird, mammal, fish and benthic communities. It is therefore essential that
good co-operation between western and Russian partners is maintained. It is also
important to note that all data entering the database undergoes rigorous quality
assurance and quality control. An environmental atlas has been compiled by INSROP
(International Northern Sea Route Program) (Bakken et al, 1995), of which Akvaplanniva played an important role in data collection, describing the part of the environment
along the Northern Sea Route from north-west Russia to Japan. This atlas could provide
a comprehensive database for our particular study area. A similar program between
Akvaplan-niva and Petrozavodsk State University is developing a digital environmental
atlas of the White Sea.
For the data that we have in the system it has been considered important to
include metadata describing the data source and quality, references and ownership etc,
and where available and relevant, an image is included, showing for example the most
dominant species of a benthic community (Fig. 2). By making use of ArcView’s
Hotlinks function it is possible for the user to retrieve this descriptive information about
the data by simply clicking a given polygon in the map. This facility provides readily
available information to the user about the suitability of a data set for a particular
project or environmental assessment.
Base map data is crucial in any GIS so that we can simply present our spatial
data and results from queries in a geographical environment. There is little in the way of
digital maps available for this area of the Arctic. The digital base map chosen here was
the US Defense Mapping Agency Digital Chart of the World 1:1,000,000 (DCW).
There are also a number of British Admiralty Charts, and some Russian maps at various
scales showing bathymetry with varying degrees of accuracy in paper form. Since the
DCW is an immense collection of geographic and thematic data it was deemed
necessary to develop Avenue programs in Arc View to make accessing and displaying
areas and particular themes of interest simpler and more efficient. The programs include
allowing the user to select from a small scale map the DCW tiles they are interested in
displaying, and then select from a list which themes to display (e.g. Political and
Oceans, Roads, Rivers etc), and whether to display points, lines or polygons. The
selected themes are then added automatically to the active view and classified with
predefined legends. This is the first step in developing a user-friendly environment
which at this level requires little knowledge of Arc View in displaying maps for an area
of interest.
Software Development
Akvaplan-niva has built an environmental database to store data collected from the
Arctic on an MS SQL Server using MS Access and ArcView GIS as the interface. In
addition several modules have been developed which demonstrate the potential of GIS
in the role of environmental monitoring and risk analysis.
165
number of Russian institutes have large amounts of data from these Arctic areas,
describing bird, mammal, fish and benthic communities. It is therefore essential that
good co-operation between western and Russian partners is maintained. It is also
important to note that all data entering the database undergoes rigorous quality
assurance and quality control. An environmental atlas has been compiled by INSROP
(International Northern Sea Route Program) (Bakken et al, 1995), of which Akvaplanniva played an important role in data collection, describing the part of the environment
along the Northern Sea Route from north-west Russia to Japan. This atlas could provide
a comprehensive database for our particular study area. A similar program between
Akvaplan-niva and Petrozavodsk State University is developing a digital environmental
atlas of the White Sea.
For the data that we have in the system it has been considered important to
include metadata describing the data source and quality, references and ownership etc,
and where available and relevant, an image is included, showing for example the most
dominant species of a benthic community (Fig. 2). By making use of ArcView’s
Hotlinks function it is possible for the user to retrieve this descriptive information about
the data by simply clicking a given polygon in the map. This facility provides readily
available information to the user about the suitability of a data set for a particular
project or environmental assessment.
Base map data is crucial in any GIS so that we can simply present our spatial
data and results from queries in a geographical environment. There is little in the way of
digital maps available for this area of the Arctic. The digital base map chosen here was
the US Defense Mapping Agency Digital Chart of the World 1:1,000,000 (DCW).
There are also a number of British Admiralty Charts, and some Russian maps at various
scales showing bathymetry with varying degrees of accuracy in paper form. Since the
DCW is an immense collection of geographic and thematic data it was deemed
necessary to develop Avenue programs in Arc View to make accessing and displaying
areas and particular themes of interest simpler and more efficient. The programs include
allowing the user to select from a small scale map the DCW tiles they are interested in
displaying, and then select from a list which themes to display (e.g. Political and
Oceans, Roads, Rivers etc), and whether to display points, lines or polygons. The
selected themes are then added automatically to the active view and classified with
predefined legends. This is the first step in developing a user-friendly environment
which at this level requires little knowledge of Arc View in displaying maps for an area
of interest.
Software Development
Akvaplan-niva has built an environmental database to store data collected from the
Arctic on an MS SQL Server using MS Access and ArcView GIS as the interface. In
addition several modules have been developed which demonstrate the potential of GIS
in the role of environmental monitoring and risk analysis.