Ocean Data Viewer

Ocean Data Viewer
Business

Reducing risk, increasing
sustainability
The world’s oceans and coasts are becoming ever smaller as users of ocean space compete for marine resources and services.

From a business perspective, biodiversity risk management; the process of understanding and mitigating environmental and social risks of projects; is essential for effective project implementation. Businesses which can get integrated access to information on the location and distribution of critical marine ecosystems and sites important for biodiversity can reduce their risk and associated liability for operations in ocean and coastal waters.

As such, the ocean industry requires accurate and up to date biodiversity information to support critical business decision making. A recent meeting of global ocean industry leaders highlighted the need for better scalability, extent, and quality of data for marine spatial planning to support best practice in corporate ocean responsibility.

The Ocean Data Viewer helps companies to avoid or minimize threats to biodiversity arising from their operations by accessing critical site-scale ocean and coastal data, allowing decision-makers to incorporate important biodiversity priorities into their risk assessment procedures for existing and potential operations.

Tools in partnership with UNEP-WCMC

Coral Reef Watch
The Coral Reef Watch mission is to utilize remote sensing and in situ tools for near-real-time and long term monitoring, modeling and reporting of physical environmental conditions of coral reef ecosystems.

Integrated Biodiversity Assessment Tool
IBAT for business is an innovative tool designed to facilitate access to accurate and up-to-date biodiversity information to support critical business decisions. The tool is the result of a ground-breaking conservation partnership among BirdLife International, Conservation International, International Union for Conservation of Nature and UNEP-WCMC.
2010 Biodiversity Indicators Partnership (2010 BIP)
The 2010 BIP, hosted by UNEP-WCMC, is a global initiative to track progress towards achieving the CBD’s “2010 biodiversity target” to significantly reduce the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010. The Partnership brings together many international organizations working on indicators, to provide the best available information on biodiversity trends.

Global Island Database
The Global Island Database aims to enhance the participation and role of islands in international decision-making through identifying and bringing together existing sources of data and information relevant to island systems, and presenting new analyses to aid resource managers and decision-making.
Habitat Validation Tool
This tool allows basic editing and validation of coastal habitat data and is being tested with the Global Distribution of Coral Reefs (2010) and the African subset of the USGS Global Distribution of Mangrove (2000) dataset. This tool will ultimately improve the accuracy of coastal habitat datasets supporting better decision-making. It forms part of our work under the Better Data, Better Decisions Initiative.

Protected Planet
This new interactive website provides data from the World Database on Protected Areas, a partnership between UNEP-WCMC and IUCN, and presents it in combination with other data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), Wikipedia, Flickr, and Panoramio. It also provides statistics about protected areas by country.
GRAME Database
In support of a proposed UN Regular Process for the Global Reporting and Assessment of the Marine Environment, including Socio-Economic Aspects, this is a searchable database of over 1000 relevant assessments, scientific research studies and data holdings at a range of scales.

Coral Disease Database
The first version of the GCDD was launched in 2000 and was populated with some 2000 points of data from 155 references, mostly peer reviewed scientific literature. more.