The African Marine Atlas (www.africanmarineatlas.net), developed in ODINAFRICA-III as a pan-African regional product, was a good starting point in the development of a functional Coastal and Marine Spatial Data Infrastructure for Africa. However the scales for the layers in the continental scale atlas are coarse and will not be useful for integrated management of the environment and resources at the local and national levels.
The next version of the African Marine Atlas will be an online mapping application based on Web Map Services (WMS), an OpenGIS international standard that produces maps of spatially referenced data dynamically from geographic information. AMA will use Map Server, an open source development environment for building spatially enabled internet applications (http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/). The use of a standards complaint web mapping application will ensure interoperability with other atlas development projects in Africa. AMA will provide an overview of topics related to African marine and coastal areas, as well as an interactive atlas where the user can select map layers from various organisations to view and query. AMA will also allow the user to search for available layers, view metadata, and in most cases download data. The focus will be on developing layers, which address priority issues at local, national and regional level.
The ODINAFRICA Planning meeting emphasised the importance of going beyond the cataloguing and archiving of data and adding value to the data by developing scenarios, models, and forecasts that can assist in decision making. The following were identified as some of the issues that may be considered: shoreline changes (erosion and accretion rates, tidal charts and bathymetry, non-tidal sea level anomalies which reflect upwelling or storm surges, evaluation of sea level rise trends along the African coasts), marine related hazards and disaster management (coastal flooding and inundation maps, storm surge predictions, pollution and extreme events), management of key ecosystems, and sustainable use of resources (productivity of coastal waters, biodiversity status and assessments, dynamics of upwelling based on remote sensing data and insitu SST measurements). The results from these would also be incorporated into the Marine Atlases.
National Coordination meetings will agree on the priority issues to be addressed at the local and national level, and select pilot sites to focus efforts on. Regional meetings will decide the priority issues to be addressed at the regional level, in collaboration with other regional projects (in particular the Large Marine Ecosystem projects).
