Answering Environmental European Directives through information systems

Since the seventies, European Commission has developed diverse legislative tools to control quality status and varied impacts and pressures to fluvial, estuarine and coastal systems. Amongst them, the Water Framework Directive (WFD), the Marine Strategy Framework Directive and the Nature 2000 Network centralize the most significant environmental policies. WFD aims to provide a common framework for the protection and improvement of surface waters (rivers, lakes, transitional waters and coastal waters) and groundwaters in Europe. Consequently, Member States of the European Union establish the current status of water bodies through systematic monitoring networks that generate temporal series of huge amount of environmental information that must be managed efficiently. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have been a key component of the management process during the implementation of the WFD and Natura 2000 Network in Cantabria. The evolution of Geographic Information software over the last decades has been evident; from isolated desktop GI software to European Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI), allowing scientists, managers, environmental experts and partners to obtain new GIS capabilities to manage environmental information. This paper is based on the development of a management infrastructure specially focused on answering Environmental European Directives. The environmental data is managed through a Relational DataBase Management System (RDBMS) and a GIS Server. These two components allow the centralization of data and creation of services that can be exploited from different applications. Scientists and managers are able to access the information through heavier-weight desktop clients or through web clients that have been developed specifically. Consequently, a management infrastructure has been built to manage all the environmental information of the Cantabria region. Environmental professionals can access specific web sites that answer the needs of European Dir- - ectives whereas public web sites retrieve environmental information provided by the system. The Environmental Information System presented allows researchers and managers to manage large amounts of environmental information, implement methodological procedures to answer Environmental European Directives and provide interoperability protocols to share environmental information. As a future line of work, one of the most important goals is the implementation of new methodologies and provide new services to the public sector through a Spatial Data Infrastructure, following the Inspire Directive initiative.