Contribute to MESH
There are a number of ways you can contribute to the MESH
project both as an individual and through the organisation you work
for. The easiest is by simply using the MESH products
and allowing the tools, techniques and guides to
facilitate your own work:
- Use the MESH products
- Contribute data
/ habitat maps / metadata to the mapping services
- Join the MESH
stakeholder network
- Give
feedback on your experiences of the MESH products
If you are actively involved in marine management either at a
local or international level or just have a interest in what lies
beneath the sea the MESH website has something to offer
you!
Contributing Data to the MESH Project
Effective management of the marine environment requires
information on the spatial distribution and the quality of seabed
habitats. Before the MESH Project started, there was no single
access point for seabed habitat mapping data in north-west Europe.
Since 2004, the collation of metadata and data has formed a
large part of the work of project partners. Metadata are ‘data
about data’ and are extremely useful when searching for information
as well as when trying to make judgements about its usefulness and
quality. The data are the actual seabed mapping data, which may be
in various forms including polygon maps, point samples and images
of the seabed. The MESH webGIS is a purpose built interactive
mapping website which displays these collated data and allows users
to access their associated metadata. The resulting website delivers
significant volumes of habitat mapping data to the public domain.
If your organisation holds seabed mapping data, you can
contribute to MESH! This page contains all the information and
downloadable documents you
will need to contribute your data.
Within each country, one MESH Partner leads the metadata and
data collation. These organisations gather seabed mapping data and
metadata from data providers, and this provision of data is subject
to a Data Agreement between the MESH partner and data provider. The
data provider can grant different levels of data access, ranging
from permission simply to hold the data, through various levels of
interpretation and processing and dissemination, to the highest
level of access which is permission to share the data with third
parties.
The flow diagram above shows the simplified flow of data
from the provider to the stakeholder. In the UK the MESH partner
responsible for data collation is JNCC, and additionally JNCC
collates data from the lead partners in other countries. We have
gathered data and metadata from a wide range of organisations
including conservation agencies, government bodies, NGOs, and
private sector companies. After receiving the seabed mapping data
and metadata, JNCC processes and loads them onto the MESH website
where they are displayed on the MESH webGIS, linked to the Online
Metadata Catalogue which contains over 1000 records for seabed
mapping studies carried out in the MESH area. The MESH webGIS and
Online Metadata Catalogue are free to register and easy to use.
More than 200 collated seabed maps are presented together with
background data layers to give context, such as bathymetry,
acoustic images, seabed photos, sediment maps and boundaries.
Stakeholders can view and query the data and metadata online, as
well as building reports of species or habitats in areas of
interest and printing maps.
If you decide to contribute data to the MESH Project, the
first step is to read the
MESH Data
Provider Agreement and decide on a level of access which is
suitable for the data resource. Then you should create a
metadata entry for the data resource using the
MESH metadata standard:
this is available as a spreadsheet template. At this stage you can
also assess the confidence in the data resource if it is a habitat
map. This can be done either using the
MESH Confidence
Tool (online) or the
MESH Confidence Scoresheet.
We have defined a series of
Data Exchange
Formats for a variety of data types which can be
contributed to MESH. These increase in compexity from the Study
Area DEF (outline polygon, few attributes), to the Original Habitat
DEF (habitat map, few attributes including untranslated habitat
codes), and finally to the Translated Habitat DEF (for habitat
maps translated to EUNIS, has audit trail attributes). The flow
diagram below shows the questions you should answer to decide which
DEF(s) is/are appropriate. If your data resource is not a habitat
map, it may still be useful to the MESH Project so please contact
us for more information about formats for supporting data. If it is
habitat or species point data you should use the Sample DEF. Data
and metadata can be contributed at any time, and will be
uploaded to the website in the next upload, usually every 6
months.