Protecting Coastal Habitats through Improved Oil Spill Planning and Response: Web-based Data Portals and Visualization Tools for Integrating Resource Data with ShoreZone

Quick access to the spatial distributions of shoreline features and habitats in Alaska can be critical for planning and responding to oil spills, managing coastal resources, identifying essential fish habitat, and for any many other uses.  The Alaska ShoreZone program has been providing physical and biological characterizations of Alaskan shorelines for those activities since the first surveys in Cook Inlet in 2001.  The searchable database includes mapped ShoreZone features and habitats such as shoreline morphology, sediment substrate, beach exposure, and “biobands” mapped as eelgrass, canopy kelps, salt marshes, or other biotic habitat descriptors.  These data, with the high-resolution shoreline imagery, provide a framework in which to integrate other geospatial resource data. 

Two data portals that have become integrated components of NOAA’s new “flex” ShoreZone website will be demonstrated to show how species-level invertebrate, seaweed, and fish data are visualized within the context of ShoreZone data and imagery.  Examples from Alaska will be used to demonstrate the web-based Cook Inlet Response Tool, which integrates ShoreZone habitat imagery and data with other resource data, real-time data sensors, and forecast models.