Coastal Services Center

What if all the data about a state's coastline—everything from maps to current weather conditions—were in one easy-to-access place? Beach lovers, researchers, and coastal resource managers in Oregon are taking advantage of a Web site that is one of the country's most comprehensive information sources about a state's shoreline.

"The scope of this project is enormous," says Paul Klarin, coastal project coordinator with the Oregon Ocean-Coastal Management Program. "It goes much deeper in data and content" than other similar Web sites.

The Oregon Coastal Atlas is a "portal" to interactive maps, and data and metadata collected by local, state, and federal agencies, and researchers. Users of the Web site can search a wide variety of data, which can be viewed in their original context or manipulated to solve spatial problems using on-line tools. The site provides everything from hydrography data sets to information on the facilities available at beach-access sites.

Dawn Wright, a professor of geosciences at Oregon State University, says the atlas will help managers and researchers address beach erosion, salmon restoration, protection of marine fisheries, and forecasting of ocean and atmospheric conditions. Surfers and beachgoers are using the site to get information on the coastline and coastal issues.

The Coastal Atlas is Oregon's contribution to the National Spatial Data Infrastructure, the purpose of which is to provide consistent ways to share geographic data among all users.

If You Build It...

Klarin had the original vision for the atlas in the late 90s as the state's use of geospatial data took off. The problem, he says, was that data were being collected in a variety of incompatible formats, scales, and projections by state, local, and federal agencies, and university researchers. Once completed, projects often sat on a shelf or were forgotten as staff moved on to new projects or positions.

"The data essentially was in the hands of those project people and wasn't available for distribution," Klarin recalls. "I didn't want to lose that data. I wanted to find a way to keep it and distribute it, and make it useful for everybody."

In 2000, Klarin helped forge a partnership of the coastal program, Oregon State University's Department of Geosciences, and Ecotrust, a nonprofit organization that promotes conservation-based development, to design and build the Coastal Atlas.

A Question of Technology

When Klarin first had the idea for the atlas just six years ago, he says there wasn't adequate technology to fulfill his vision. "This was before Web mapping was anything like it is today," notes Wright.

But the right technology "arrived sooner than we thought," Klarin says.

With seed money from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Coastal Services Center, the partners began convening small workgroups where they "combed the field trying to figure out the best way to go about" creating the atlas, including talking to potential system users and examining data, available technology, software options, and storage needs.

Klarin credits the system's design and smooth operation to Tanya Haddad, the project technical coordinator and system administrator, who "made a complex system simple to use."

Brick by Brick

A four-year, $508,000 grant from the National Science Foundation and additional funds from the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) enabled the partners to build and bring the atlas to life.

The funding enabled the coastal program to hire Haddad full-time to work on designing and building the atlas. One of the most time-consuming elements, Wright notes, was making sure all the metadata were present and accurate. Oregon State University undergraduate students were hired to perform this tedious task.

Wright says the design of the atlas "draws from the reality that resource decision-making applications require much more than simple access to data. Resource managers commonly make decisions that involve modeling risk, assessing cumulative impacts, and weighing proposed alterations to ecosystem functions and values."

Layer upon Layer

When the atlas went live in December 2002, it had 500 to 600 geographic information system (GIS) data coverages. There are plans, Klarin says, for upwards of several thousand.

While the information on the atlas appears seamless to the user, pieces of it actually reside on each partner's server.

Upon entering the atlas, the user finds four main functional areas represented by different tabs across the top of the screen: Maps, Tools, Learn, and Search. Content is accessible through different paths to accommodate the different types of users.

Under Maps and Tools, users can create maps on-line, display the data, and manipulate them. The newly created maps can be saved as Portable Document Format (PDF) files so that they can be kept and printed.

Wright says popular data sets include hydrography, public land-survey system section lines, transportation, county boundaries, territorial-sea lines, orthophotos, elevation, land cover, and bathymetry. All data sets have metadata that meet FGDC standards.

Klarin notes that the mapping feature of the atlas has been helpful to coastal staff members located across the state. With the atlas, when discussing a specific project, staff members can be "looking at the same image with the same data at the same time, instead of everyone looking at a variety of different maps... That's very useful."

The Tools of the Trade

The Tools tab includes a wide variety of tools for planners, as well as the "I found a bug" tool, where users can report information about typos, missing images, or other mistakes or problems.

The Learn section is the equivalent of an on-line encyclopedia about the Oregon coast, Wright says. Information is broken down into four different coastal settings—estuaries, sandy shores, rocky shores, and ocean areas—and by topic, including hazards, access, history, and processes.

When users click on the estuaries section, they find information on the state's 22 estuaries, including graphics and fact sheets. By going to the access topic, users can click on the coastal access inventory page, www.coastalatlas.net/tools/public/coastal_access.asp, which has a searchable detailed database on public beach access points.

The Search section provides links to searchable GIS data sets, and in the future will include archives. Links throughout the atlas are provided to other relevant Web sites.

Construction Continues

The atlas, Klarin says, is continually being updated. "It's never static. It's always changing and we're always making improvements. We use feedback from users and our own observations to keep it fresh and keep it moving."

Klarin adds, "We're never looking towards finishing the project and putting it in a box. Technology is not like that and the user community is not like that. We've always kept the scope aggressive and over the top. It keeps us pushing towards the edge."

To access the Oregon Coastal Atlas, point your browser to www.coastalatlas.net. For more information, contact Paul Klarin at (503) 373-0050, ext. 249, or paul.klarin@state.or.us. You may also contact Dawn Wright at (541) 737-1229, or dawn@dusk.geo.orst.edu.