AquaMaps

Access to VREs

VREs are accessible through the D4Science portal.

Introduction to AquaMaps

The AquaMaps Virtual Research Environment (VRE), implemented during the D4Science project and further expanded in D4Science-II, is designed to provide fisheries and aquaculture scientists with a collection of species distribution maps. The AquaMaps images show species distributions of a large number of economically important species across all major oceans and continents. AquaMaps images are an important tool for species assessment.

The AquaMaps collections have been generated by processing data of 9154 species and 56,468,301 database records representing the probability of occurrence in half degree surface grid cells.

Five collections have now been generated by filtering, grouping and rendering these data: species maps, family maps, order maps, class maps and phylum maps. These collections contain compound objects that consist of images and related metadata; the distribution maps are available not only as a two-dimensional map of the earth, but also as three-dimensional views from the poles, three-dimensional views for the continents, and three-dimensional views for the oceans.

The AquaMaps VRE provides an extra tool for scientist to quickly locate distribution maps and share these in a Virtual Research Environment. The AquaMaps are one of the first collections to be made available in the Virtual Research Environment space, and more data-sources will be added over time, thus creating a true Virtual Research Environment.

D4Science-II is creating a VRE that exploits data obtained from multiple sources (like GENESI-DR, OBIS, NEON and GBIF), specific services, and the computational capability of the Grid to support the AquaMaps service in the generation of more precise, accurate, synthetic and predictive maps. The D4Science-enabled interoperability also makes it much easier for other infrastructures to take advantage of the predictive data generated by the AquaMaps VRE.

Note: This scenario responds to the concrete demands of the scientific community, which plans to make the final outcome of D4Science-II available in its own production working environment at the end of the project.

AquaMaps VRE video

A Virtual Research Environment for Species Distribution Map Generation and Management