Development of a Spatial Decision Support System for the Biological Influences on Inter-Tidal Areas (Biota) Project within the Land Ocean Interaction Study

Abstract

The Land Ocean Interaction Study (LOIS) is a major NERC initiative seeking to understand the exchange, transformation and storage of energy and materials between the land and the ocean. In LOIS the BIOTA programme studies the fluxes of the inter-tidal zone and especially the interactions between biotic and abiotic components of the system. To facilitate communication and co-operation the BIOTA data centre has developed a spatial Decision Support System (DSS) based on a hybrid distributed database and a Geographical Information System (GIS). Special attention has been paid to ensuring: known data quality, the existence of appropriate meta-data, the integration of process based models and spatial analysis and visualisation tools. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.