Marine and Coastal Information Systems for Europe and Africa

European Commission – Joint Research Centre. Institute for Environment and Sustainability I-21027 Ispra ( Va), Italy.
Nicolas.hoepffner@jrc.ec.europa.eu

Abstract

Marine Information Systems for Europe (EMIS, http://emis.jrc.ec.europa.eu/) and Africa (AMIS, http://amis.jrc.ec.europa.eu/) have been recently developed at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission to provide the Users with an appropriate set of biophysical information, of importance to conduct water quality assessment, resource monitoring and climate change studies in the coastal and marine waters. These are simple and easy-to-use mapping tool applications, created for the publication and dissemination of African marine information via the web. Both systems rely mostly on Earth Observation data from optical and thermal sensors, processed according to standard (i.e., space agency-related) and in-house peer-reviewed algorithms, as well modeled data to generate indicators for global diagnostic of the coastal state and analyses of changes in marine ecosystems. In addition, the systems supply the users with basic navigation and interrogation tools with a range of time-series and statistical analysis generated automatically in a format ready for publication / reporting, and enabling decision makers to make full and lasting use of this information.

In this work, we review the different features of the systems through case studies such as marine eutrophication in Europe, coastal productivity in Eastern Africa, and their evolution with time.