With expanding human uses at sea, the objective of maritime spatial planning (MSP) to promote sustainable coexistence between marine uses becomes an increasingly challenging task. In order to assess coexistence options, both use-use interactions and use-environment interactions are important to explore. Tools for doing cumulative impact assessments (CIA) on the environment provide a means for spatially exploring environmental impacts. Finding inspiration in such ecosystem-based spatial use-environment approaches while drawing on pairwise marine use compatibility knowledge from existing literature, a spatial approach to model potential synergies and conflicts between marine uses through an expert-based scoring system is presented and implemented in SEANERGY, an ArcMap-based opensource toolbox. A test based on Baltic Sea GIS data demonstrates how SEANERGY supplements CIA analyzes with knowledge about potential use-use synergies, potential use-use conflicts, and their spatial extents, useful for optimizing the use of marine space in MSP without putting too much cumulative pressure on the environment.
With expanding human uses at sea, the objective of maritime spatial planning (MSP) to promote sustainable coexistence between marine uses becomes an increasingly challenging task. In order to assess coexistence options, both use-use interactions and use-environment interactions are important to explore. Tools for doing cumulative impact assessments (CIA) on the environment provide a means for spatially exploring environmental impacts. Finding inspiration in such ecosystem-based spatial use-environment approaches while drawing on pairwise marine use compatibility knowledge from existing literature, a spatial approach to model potential synergies and conflicts between marine uses through an expert-based scoring system is presented and implemented in SEANERGY, an ArcMap-based opensource toolbox. A test based on Baltic Sea GIS data demonstrates how SEANERGY supplements CIA analyzes with knowledge about potential use-use synergies, potential use-use conflicts, and their spatial extents, useful for optimizing the use of marine space in MSP without putting too much cumulative pressure on the environment.
Despite a list of national and international efforts to harmonise data management procedures, the categorisation of space and time within datasets in marine spatial planning (MSP) has not been addressed so far. This paper proposes a conceptual framework to categorise the spatial and temporal dimensions of data used in MSP and introduces a method to jointly manage non-spatial information and spatial data in the same geographic information system (GIS). The presented categorisation provides easy and intuitive classifications for a more detailed and transparent data description of spatial and temporal data properties, which can be applied both in attribute tables and in metadata. It allows the differentiation of the vertical and the horizontal dimensions, enabling users to focus on operations taking place at specific parts of the marine environment. The categorisation with predefined attribute domains allows space and time based automatic analyses. The inclusion of non-spatial data within GIS repositories ensures the availability of all relevant data in one database minimising the risk of incomplete data. Overall, the framework provides effective steps towards a more coherent data management and subsequently may foster better use of information in MSP processes.