Publishing marine plans with the Marine

Information System (MIS)

Alex Coomer, GIS Manager

11th June 2014

The Marine Management Organisation - a brief history

• Established in April 2010

• An executive non-departmental public body (NDPB) established and

given powers under the Marine and Coastal Access Act 2009

• Our mission: enabling sustainable growth in our marine area and to

promote the UK government’s vision for clean, healthy, safe, productive

and biologically diverse oceans and seas

• What we do (for England):

– Marine planning

– Marine licensing

– Marine nature conservation

– Fisheries management

– Enforcement

Today’s presentation

• Focus on marine planning

• Requirement to publish the first ever marine plan for England via

the Marine Information System (MIS)

• The use of ArcGIS Online as a simple and effective

communication tool

• Future improvements to the Marine Information System

What is marine planning?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFn0buPVU6A

Just in case that didn’t work...

• Defra (2004) ‘Strategic, forward-looking planning for regulating,

managing and protecting the marine environment, including through

allocation of space, that addresses the multiple, cumulative, and

potentially conflicting uses of the sea.’

• The use of marine space and resources is increasing. A marine plan will

ensure the area is managed sustainably, considering social,

environmental and economic objectives.

• Benefits of marine planning:

– A strategic approach to managing our seas

– Guiding marine users to the most suitable locations for particular activities

– Greater certainty for developers

– Sustainable use of marine resources

– Proactive- allowing for future changes to activities and technologies

Marine Protected Areas

Defence & National Security

Renewable

energy

Carbon capture & Storage

Marine dredging & disposal

Fisheries

The marine plans will provide policy and guidance covering 14

different marine related sectors:

Marine plan areas

• 11 plan areas (10 plans)

• Marine planning is an iterative

process, moving around each of

the marine plan areas in turn.

• First marine plans focus on East

inshore and East offshore from

Flamborough Head to Felixstowe

Publishing the first ever marine plans

• Adopted 2nd April 2014

• Detailed 200 page document including

– 38 plan policies across 14 different sectors

– 28 static maps referencing over 110 different spatial data layers

How do we communicate this information to

stakeholders and the wider public?

• Need to publish a complex, static document in an intuitive and

interactive way

– publish via the internet

– for use by both specialists and the public

– adopt corporate MMO branding

• Highlight key policy considerations

• Provide access to spatial information at different scales (user

defined)

• Signpost to wide variety of data sources

• Solution needs to be flexible with content managed by the

organisation

• Zero capital funding and a potentially changeable deadline

Initial challenges

• Project had no budget allocation with limited staff resources

– no software programming experience

– basic web content management system

• Technical solution therefore needed to utilise either free/open

source solution or software already available to our organisation

• Over 110 spatial datasets to be published as interactive maps

– Data needed to be managed in-house.

– MMO have access to ArcGIS Server, but network security prevented the

external publication of GIS services such as WMS , WFS or REST

• Tight deadline, approximately 3 months before the launch date

Identification of the solution…

• MMO is a member of the Defra network and part of an Enterprise

Licence Agreement (ELA) with ESRI

– 3 year agreement

– access to a suite of ESRI software products and solutions

– access to a number of ESRI consultancy days

• ESRI ELA includes access to a Defra network ArcGIS Online

account with an allocation of credits.

– allows data to be stored in the AGOL cloud and published either as a GIS

service or via an interactive webmap

– webmaps can be embedded within any web page using simple HTML code,

no requirement to write any code yourself

Data was loaded into the AGOL cloud…

Create a webmap with the data, configure and share…

A note of caution for data managers…

• If your data is stored in the AGOL cloud, once your webmap is

published (i.e. made publically available), the content in the map is

also made publicly available and can be downloaded or

consumed by other applications.

• This can cause issues if you wish to use commercially licensed

data, or 3rd party data acquired under licence.

• Where necessary MMO sought permission from data owners to

ensure there was no breach of conditions.

• For a small number of datasets a WMS service from an existing

MMO tool was used which prevented data download, although

there is a loss in some functionality.

• This allowed us to

embed interactive maps

directly into the MMO’s

website.

• Maps can be positioned

and re-sized

accordingly.

• Allows for the display of

spatial data alongside

relevant policy text

www.marinemanagement.org.uk/marineplanning/mis/index.htm

Next step - enhance the user experience

• Embedded webmaps provide clear links between spatial data and

associated policy

• Users often want more flexibility, the ability to view and overlay

different marine plan policy layers together

• We needed a simple GIS application to provide access to over

110 spatial data layers

• ArcGIS Online was able to provide a solution

• The basic viewer application can be downloaded from the GIThub

website and configured locally.

• MMO used 2 ESRI consultancy days to help with the initial

configuration.

– Support to download code and set up the application

– Tweaks to the styling and branding of the application

– HTML, Java, CSS

– Put in place the foundations for MMO to continue to customise the application.

• Application is hosted on the MMO web server, sources a

published webmap from ArcGIS Online

Interactive map application...

The result = the Marine Information System (MIS)

http://www.marinemanagement.org.uk/marineplanning/mis/index.htm

What’s next for MIS?

• Continue to improve and enhance the tool

– Develop a policy check tool; potentially using the forthcoming Java Script API

builder

• Look at the possibility of hosting spatial data in-house

– Improved efficiencies relating to data management

– More control over the GIS services, including the ability to prevent data

download or access in other applications

• Potential links to other MMO systems, to assist in the

implementation of plan led marine management.

• Including consuming 3rd party data direct from their systems (e.g. from across

the Defra network, DECC or The Crown Estate

Thank you for your time.

alex.coomer@marinemanagement.org.uk

www.marinemanagement.org.uk

www.marinemanagement.org.uk/marineplanning/mis/index.htm