Environmental Marine Information System – A geo-portal to assist in the management of European Seas and global ocean

Understanding the inner workings of European and global seas and coasts is essential to support politicalrequirements underlined by marine and maritime policies, as well as to achieve commitments with regard tointernational conventions addressing biodiversity targets, climate change and efficient use of natural resources. Asan example, the ‘Marine Strategy Framework Directive’ (MSFD) is a legal instrument in Europe aiming at a goodenvironmental status of European seas by 2020. The conception, development, implementation and monitoringof this directive require the provision of timely, quality assured and easy-to-use data and information. The JointResearch Centre (JRC) of the European Commission in its role as a Competence Centre for the Marine StrategyFramework Directive (MSFD) has developed the Environmental Marine Information System (EMIS) to assistMember States with the monitoring and assessment of their marine and coastal waters in Europe and globally.EMIS provides the user community with a set of bio-physical information that is relying on Earth Observationdata from satellite and model outputs, and the generation of indicators for the diagnostic of the coastal state andanalyses of changes in marine ecosystems. In addition, basic navigation and interrogation tools are integrated inthe system to perform automatically time-series and statistical analyses on any region of interest for reportingpurposes.EMIS is a geo-portal implemented with services compliant with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)specifications and INSPIRE standards to ensure full interoperability. These services are connected to R-writtenfunctions, enabling the processing of EMIS data, their analysis and reporting to be integrated in a uniquedevelopment environment.