Managing marine data: Atlas of marine biodiversity in the Balearic Sea, Western Mediterranean

This project is an atlas of marine species covering a sea area of 150.000 km and integrating a wide array of taxonomic groups: 33 phylum, 615 families, 1058 genus and 1600 Mediterranean marine species in the Balearic islands,. It is composed by a database filled with data provided by different research groups in the Centre Oceanografic de Balears (COB-IEO) covering data from more than 30 years time series. A data model has been build comprising 87000 registers from 1600 marine species covering from foraminifera, sponges, algae, crustaceans, phytoplankton, to fishes. A spatial data infrastructure has been developed composed by a set of tools that allow an interoperable access to the data and the metadata with standards following the European Directive INSPIRE. A Web Map Server has been set up using ESRI ArcGis Server. It allows the publication of REST services and WMS services for being consumed by native ESRI web applications or other clients. These standards allow us to expose the data stored in the database to external applications. A web map client was developed for the data consultation where the user could search by different parameters and the results are displayed individually and aggregately. This data is available through web services for external applications to be consumed. This GIS geoportal represents a useful tool for decision making processes for coastal management, ranging from recreational uses, marine protected areas, fisheries, industry and conservation purposes. Moreover, the added value to the project is that this atlas is the first one carried out in the Mediterranean strictly including marine species from phytoplankton to large species.