Introduction
This section is dedicated to news and activities within the EULF Marine Pilot.
The EULF pilots are a series of studies in key policy areas, to apply, evaluate and contribute to the EULF.
The aim of the INSPIRE marine pilot is to help improve the understanding of INSPIRE in the management of Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD)-related spatial information, and to provide guidance and tools that facilitate the mentioned obligations.
The activity is funded by the ISA programme as part of the EULF Action, by DG ENV, and by JRC. The EEA, DE, DK and NL are partners in the first phase project and are contributing in-kind.
The pilot focused on chlorophyll-α datasets, needed to underpin the MSFD reporting, and work-out complete examples of INSPIRE-based data management. The use case that this pilot worked out in detail was:
- Harmonize the data of chlorophyll-α concentrations in the cross-border area of the Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands;
- Create the metadata for the data;
- Publish the metadata, and share the data using INSPIRE services thus fulfilling the requirements of MSFD Art. 19; and
- Use the services in an application that does some analysis on the harmonised data from the three countries.
In the first phase of the pilot this was done for data holdings in NL, DE, and DK. In the second phase the guidelines, tools and expertise are promoted in other countries participating in MSFD Working Group Data Information and Knowledge Exchange (DIKE).
Main achievements
To-date, the main outcomes of the pilot are the Requirements analysis, the Data models, recommendations for the alignment of EMODnet and INSPIRE, and Tools to implement the data flow (publishing metadata and services, data transformation). Also, a training package has been put together that will be made public in the second phase of the pilot. Guidelines for sharing marine spatial data and the Final Report are being finalised and will be published soon. For an overview of the pilot, see the Marine Pilot factsheet.