Integrated display and communication of information towards stakeholders. An application for the integrated management of the Thau lagoon and its watershed.

Lionel Loubersac, Jacques Denis

Mediterranean centre, IFREMER, (F)

Abstract

The ICZM approach is the best transversal way in planning strategies to treat coastal problems according to governance context. Such an approach uses numerous and various tools needed to elaborate and communicate the decision making and management information.
Information and communication are both strategic concerns for any coastal actors and end users and the availability of the dedicated tools looks like a real research and development problem. Indeed, they must be able to concept, build and transfer the knowledge required and useful for IZCM actions, at the interface of Science with Policy and Practice.
The success of such research and development actions lies mainly on the capacity of searchers to integrate various modular tools (models, GIS, softwares, data bases, etc.) according to societal demand and public policies.
These needs for Research and Development are presently taken in account in a specific project supported by the French Ministry of Research and Technology (network "Earth and Space"), called "AGIL". The objective of this applied research project is oriented to promote scientific response for coastal management concerns towards ICZM practitioners and managers. It is based on the principle to supply common resources (data, expertise and tools) coming from a ICZM consortium in order to gain in synergy and added value in terms of information and communication. Such capacity has been tested on two pilot sites, one on La Réunion island, and one other in the Languedoc-Roussillon Region (french mediterranean border), especially on the Thau lagoon and its watershed and coastal waters.
A prototype system has been built to integrate any useful modules and demonstrate its operational performances. This prototype named NAMIBIE (a French acronym for Integrated Multimedia Navigator Within Coastal Environment Data Bases) is a specific tool which first concept has been established by Ifremer and has been developed within the AGIL project by an association between research in the field of coastal environment, innovation in the field of new information and communication technologies and services in the field of coastal integrated management and impact studies.
The aim of this tool is to facilitate research, direct access and display of relevant multimedia coastal integrated data and information according to an interactive, widely opened and play-full interface.
The principles are based upon the fact that sustainable decision making needs an optimised understanding of coastal processes and better consultation between actors. In this purpose the development of the tool has considered that the end user should and could be free to look after the data and the information he needs for a particular site or environment of interest and for a specific ICZM question according to easy navigation interfaces.
That is why the NAMIBIE concept is based upon :
- a coherent 3D representation of the coasts (i.e. from watershed areas to continental shelf and deep sea), which consider a coherent DEM from land to sea and textural representation of the environment by using satellite imagery textural displays,
- a 3D navigator which allows the user to fly or dive over and within the coastal environment of interest,
- a multimedia database (text, graphs, image, maps, geographic objects, modelling results…) specific to the territory of interest,
- an interactive interface which helps in finding relevant information associated to specific questions, i.e. display of geographic objects, access to multimedia attributes (texts, graphs, images…), direct access to environmental indicators and to simulations and animated objects (modelling results).

The technologies used include VRML data format, integration of standard GIS format (shp, grid, img) within the navigator, integration and display of modelling data. The production chain realised in C++ and Java Scripts allowsdialogue between web pages and 3D windows.
Applications are presented on the coastal sectors of the Languedoc Roussillon Region in the framework of ICZM problematics.
It is proposed that the interactive demonstration prototype be presented and discussed at the Eco Imagine Conference in complement to the presentation that has been achieved at the Littoral 2004 Conference in Aberdeen last september.