HabitatSpace: Multidimensional characterization of pelagic essential fish habitat

Habitat is recognized as crucial to the survival and recovery of exploited species. Climate change, environmental variability, and increased anthropogenic modification of the oceans add a sense of urgency to the correct identification, monitoring and conservation of essential fish habitat. Identifying essential habitat in three dimensions is the first step in being able to react to changes in environment caused by any of these drivers. Extending tools for essential fish habitat (EFH) analysis to higher dimensions would greatly enhance the ability of scientists to evaluate and respond to climate change. The ability to create these types of analyses for pelagic species will improve our ability to support integrated ecosystem assessments (IEA). Geographic information systems (GIS) have provided many of the tools used to delineate EFH. These tools work very well for the characterization of benthic EFH, but are less usable for identifying pelagic EFH. HabitatSpace will extend the 2-D tools used for EFH to a suite of 3-D tools to strengthen analysis capabilities within the pelagic zone. Through a strategic partnership with the Northern Gulf Institute, Ecosystem Data Assembly Center services will be leveraged and extended to ingest a range of ecosystem data, transform data to standard, open source formats, and serve data via the THREDDS Data Server. The HabitatSpace client will operate on the end user´s desktop as either an ESRI ArcGIS extension or as a stand alone client. New analysis tools will be developed and integrated with existing features to broaden overall scientific analysis capabilities. The result will be a robust analysis tool suite that will enable the scientist to: a) create a convex hull for calculating habitat volumes; b) calculate volume on volume intersections; and c) calculate the intersection of paths taken by larvae through in situ data to create predicted temperature histories.