Ireland’s Marine Atlas is developed and maintained by the Marine Institute with funding by the Government of Ireland. This work is part supported by the Irish Government and the European Maritime & Fisheries Fund as part of the EMFF Operational Programme for 2014-2020. The atlas provides a one-stop-shop to view and download marine environmental data relevant to reporting under Ireland’s Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD). The aim of the European Union’s MSFD directive is to protect more effectively the marine environment across Europe through the establishment of “good marine waters”. Data in Ireland’s Marine Atlas has been guided by the European Directive on harmonising environmental data across Europe within a spatial data infrastructure known as INSPIRE. INSPIRE Data Specifications (Data Models) have been used to manage data to the categories visible under THEMES in the atlas. Many of the layers displayed in the Atlas are also used in the National Marine Planning Framework (NMPF). This framework aims to bring together all marine-based human activities, outlining the government’s vision, objectives and marine planning policies for each marine activity. The NMPF report details how these marine activities will interact with each other in an ocean space that is under increasing spatial pressure, ensuring the sustainable use of our marine resources to 2040. Please read the following information carefully as it sets out the terms and conditions that govern the use of products and services on this website. Once you have read these terms and conditions click the "Agree" button at the bottom of the page to proceed. By clicking the "Agree" button you will be deemed to have accepted the terms and conditions, our legal notices and privacy statement.

NCAR was established by the National Science Foundation in 1960 to provide the university community with world-class facilities and services that were beyond the reach of any individual institution. More than a half-century later, we are still delivering on that mission. NCAR provides the atmospheric and related Earth system science community with state-of-the-art resources, including supercomputers, research aircraft, sophisticated computer models, and extensive data sets. From its founding, NCAR was meant to provide the atmospheric research community with the shared resources necessary to work on the most important scientific problems of the day. Not much has changed. The hundreds of scientists who work here research all things atmospheric — which includes everything from the microphysics of cloud formation and the chemistry of air pollution to large-scale planetary waves and the impact of increased greenhouse gases on our climate. Since the atmosphere interacts with everything it touches, its crucial to investigate those interactions, too.

NASA's Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC) is located at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. PO.DAAC manages and provides tools and services for NASA's oceanographic and hydrologic data (satellite, airborne, and in-situ) to enable a greater understanding of the physical processes and conditions of the global ocean. Measurements include gravity, ocean winds, sea surface temperature, ocean surface topography, sea surface salinity, and circulation. The data support a wide range of applications including climate research, weather prediction, resource management, policy, and the stewardship of ocean data resources.

The Western Channel Observatory (WCO) is an oceanographic time-series and marine biodiversity reference site in the Western English Channel. In situ measurements are undertaken weekly at coastal station L4 and fortnightly at open shelf station E1 using the research vessels of the Plymouth Marine Laboratory and the Marine Biological Association. These measurements are complemented by PML's recognised excellence in ecosystem modelling and satellite remote sensing science. By integrating these different observational disciplines we can begin to disentangle the complexity of the marine ecosystem. The WCO measures several key parameters important to the functioning of the marine ecosystem such as light, temperature, salinity and nutrients. Station L4 has some of the longest time-series in the world for zooplankton and phytoplankton, and fish trawls have been made by the MBA for a century. Station E1 has a hydrographic series dating from 1903. These long series are complemented by hourly measurements made at our moorings situated at both stations. These can elucidate changes not captured by the routine weekly sampling.

The Copernicus Marine Service (or Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service) is the marine component of the Copernicus Programme of the European Union. It provides free, regular and systematic authoritative information on the state of the Blue (physical), White (sea ice) and Green (biogeochemical) ocean, on a global and regional scale. It is funded by the European Commission (EC) and implemented by Mercator Ocean International. It is designed to serve EU policies and International legal Commitments related to Ocean Governance, to cater for the needs of society at large for global ocean knowledge and to boost the Blue Economy across all maritime sectors by providing free-of-charge state-of-the-art ocean data and information. It provides key inputs that support major EU and international policies and initiatives and can contribute to: combating pollution, marine protection, maritime safety and routing, sustainable use of ocean resources, developing marine energy resources, blue growth, climate monitoring, weather forecasting, and more. It also aims to increase awareness amongst the general public by providing European and global citizens with information about ocean-related issues.

The primary aim of the Fisheries and Resources Monitoring System (FIRMS) is to provide access to a wide range of high-quality information on the global monitoring and management of fishery marine resources. FIRMS draws together a unified partnership of international organizations, regional fishery bodies and, in the future, national scientific institutes, collaborating within formal agreement to report and share information on fisheries resources. For effective fisheries information management, FIRMS also participates in the development and promotion of agreed standards. FIRMS system is part of the Fisheries Global Information System (FIGIS). Information provided by the partners is organized in a database and published in the form of fact sheets. This system provides the data owner with tools to ensure controlled dissemination of high quality and updated information.

The ODIS "Catalogue of Sources" aims to be an online browsable and searchable catalogue of existing ocean related web-based sources/systems of data and information as well as products and services. It will also provide information on products and visualize the landscape (entities and their connections) of ocean data and information sources. It will contribute to the objectives of the Agenda 2030, and in particular the UN Decade for Ocean Science for Sustainable Development. The Catalogue is not an ocean database or metadata repository. The catalogue includes descriptive information such as the URL, title, description, language, point of contact, geographic scope, available technologies for machine-to-machine interaction, keywords, etc. and can be searched on many of these fields. The IODE network of NODCs has been collecting, managing and serving data for decades. This effort has yielded an extensive, but distributed and heterogeneous collection of data and information sources. Additionally, the low threshold for technical capabilities required to offer data and information over the Internet means that many of the hosted resources are not readily discoverable through NODCs, regional or international data and information systems ODIS will provide an online catalogue of (ideally) all online data/information sources (and, where possible, metadata on off-line sources as well). Many regional and international programmes and projects have developed online data/information services but there is currently no "one-stop shop" where users are offered an overview and/or common data/information discovery interface. There are currently 3090 sources (2172 are searchable) catalogued in the system.

Built and developed by researchers, to ensure that everyone can join in Open Science. The OpenAIRE project, in the vanguard of the open access and open data movements in Europe was commissioned by the EC to support their nascent Open Data policy by providing a catch-all repository for EC funded research. CERN, an OpenAIRE partner and pioneer in open source, open access and open data, provided this capability and Zenodo was launched in May 2013. In support of its research programme CERN has developed tools for Big Data management and extended Digital Library capabilities for Open Data. Through Zenodo these Big Science tools could be effectively shared with the long­-tail of research. Zenodo helps researchers receive credit by making the research results citable and through OpenAIRE integrates them into existing reporting lines to funding agencies like the European Commission. Citation information is also passed to DataCite and onto the scholarly aggregators.

Accredited through the MEDIN partnership, and core-funded by the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the Scottish Government, DASSH provides tools and services for the long-term curation, management and publication of marine species and habitats data, within the UK and internationally. Below are a selection of projects, outputs and deliverables that DASSH and the MBA Data Team have been involved in recently. - NE Data Management: DASSH have been contracted by the Marine team at Natural England (NE) to support NE data dissemination. We have been digitising datasets used in Article 17 reporting and helping them input data to Marine Recorder and MEDIN guidelines. In addition, DASSH is running a 2-day workshop with the marine data team in October 2014 on data management and standards. The aims of the workshop are to present MEDIN data guidelines and standards and to run practicals on quality assurance (QA) issues with data, creating MEDIN formatted data, and creation of MEDIN metadata. - MCZ Data Archiving: DASSH staff have been working with Defra, JNCC, Natural England, Cefas and the other MEDIN DAC's in the development and implementation of a strategy for the archiving and dissemination of MCZ survey data. This involves the archives of many terrabytes of data from the survey work undertaken at 127 sites. DASSH is currently working with the other DACs archiving the data from several MCZ sites before taking delivery of the complete survey catalogue. - Non-Natives Data Management: DASSH staff work with other members of the KE team to help deliver the MBA contribution to the GB Non-native Species Information Portal. The data team ensure the validation of records submitted and raise alerts when records of Invasive Non-Native Species of concern and in disseminating information about species distribution via DASSH and the NBN. DASSH staff continue to liaise with organisations to ensure the prompt flow of marine non-native species distribution data to the public domain. The KE team facilitated the identification of two new marine invasive non-native species in 2014 and have subsequently created the identification sheet for these species. Hemigrapsus sanguineus (from volunteer records sent in for identification) and Hemigrapsus takanoi (first recorded by the John Bishop Group survey team). - EMODNet Biology: The Data Team are part of a consortium led by the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) for the biological data component of EMODNet (European Marine Observation and Data Network). The Data Team will lead a work package relating to biological traits and indicator species as identified for Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) reporting, bringing an additional €130k of funding. - VALMER: The Data Team led a key work package in a £3.7 million (ca. €260k for the MBA) INTERREG project to "Develop, trial and refine methodologies that will be used to quantify and communicate the value (economical, social and environmental) of marine and coastal ecosystem services". The research identified an operational framework to value marine ecosystem services, and which could be used to enhance marine planning and policy decisions.

EMODnet (European Marine Observation and Data Network) is the long term marine data initiative supported by the European Commission since 2009 to ensure that European marine data will become easily accessible, interoperable, and free on restrictions on use. EMODnet Chemistry provides access to standardized, harmonized and validated chemical data collections for water quality evaluation at a regional scale, as defined by the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD). The data portal has adopted and adapted SeaDataNet standards and services, establishing interoperability between the data sets from the many different providers (more than 60 in EMODnet Chemistry network). Concentration maps of nutrients, chlorophyll-a and dissolved oxygen are computed on a standard grid, providing information at a regular time interval, per season and over several vertical layers, including the deepest one. Dedicated OGC standard services for browsing, viewing and downloading chemistry observation, data and data products for the European waters have been developed, and are actively maintained and monitored.