Geographic Information Systems have become indispensable tools in managing and displaying marine biodiversity data. Within MarBEF, we have developed a standardised register of place names, called the European Marine Gazetteer

Appeltans, W.

Claus, S.

De Hauwere, N.

Hernandez, F.

Mees, J.

Vanhoorne, B.

Claus, Simon

Appeltans, Ward

Vanhoorne, Bart

De Hauwere, Nathalie

Hernandez, Francisco

Mees, Jan

Ghent University Academic Bibliography

The European Marine Gazetteer: its development and applications

Open Marine Archive

15MarBEF NewsletterAutumn 2007
MarBEF Progress
By Simon Claus, Ward Appletans, Bart Vanhoorne, Nathalie De Hauwere, Francisco Hernandez and Jan Mees
The word ‘gazetteer’ goes back to the Latin
word gazetta and can be defined as a
geographical dictionary. There are several good
international, internet-accessible gazetteers for
the terrestrial environment, but no such system
has existed for the seas and oceans. With the
creation of the European Marine Gazetteer we
have laid the foundations for such a system.
The ultimate goal is to have a hierarchical
standard list that includes all the marine
geographical names of Europe, and of other
areas in the world where European marine
scientists have taken samples.
At the moment, the gazetteer covers all the
names that are in use by the MarBEF network
as geographical key-words for the description
of, for example, datasets and publications. The
Geographic Information Systems have become indispensable tools in managing
and displaying marine biodiversity data. Within MarBEF, we have developed a
standardised register of place names, called the European Marine Gazetteer.
list, as of September 2007, has 946 records,
including names of  seas, islands, sandbanks,
ridges, estuaries, bays, sea-mount chains,
submarine lava tubes and standard sampling
stations that are used in the different MarBEF
data systems. Besides the name and place
type, the following geographical features are
attached to each record: minimum and
maximum latitude and longitude, precision
(defined as the radius of the circle
corresponding to the geographic shapefile),
sources of information, the relationships
(parent-child, adjacent to, streams through,
rises and flows out) with other place names
The European Marine Gazetteer
– its development and applications
MarBEF Data Management
Integration is one of the key elements
of MarBEF and is continually
highlighted in scientific integration
throughout this newsletter.
Here is a successful story of
outreach integration between
MarBEF and a number of
organisations – namely MarLIN,
HERMES and the European Census
of Marine Life. The outreach officers
from each of these organisations
came together one year ago to
investigate the possibilities of
joining forces and arranging an
educational outreach exhibit under
the banner of marine biodiversity.
The chosen location was York in the
UK, and the occasion was the BA
(British Association) Festival of
Science in September. Here, we
introduced students from 5 to 18
years of age to the variety of marine
life in the oceans, from the deep
seas to the seashore.
Several of the students took up the
challenge to enter a quiz where they
would have to decide whether a
number of different plants or
animals were winners or losers as a
result of a number of different
human activities, including climate
change, dredging, litter and fishing.
Some 8,000 students visited the
festival over the five-day period and
we received a very positive response
from both the students and their
teachers on our interactive exhibit
and the educational outreach
provided. This, we hope, is only the
start of a very successful
collaboration resulting in many
more future outreach ventures.
MarBEF was showcased in the
European Commission’s stand at
the prestigious Oceans ‘07
Conference in June 2007, in
Aberdeen, Scotland, where a Power
Point presentation on the MarBEF
network was on show during the
event.
Róisín Nash
The Global Oceanic Boundaries on Google Earth.The KML files are derived from the EEZ boundary data provided by the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ).
The data were converted to Google Earth KML by Price Collins of Alphabet Systems LLC, USA.
Out and About – with Outreach
16 MarBEF Newsletter Autumn 2007
and links with available shapefiles. This
relational structure allows for browsing
through a hierarchical tree – comparable to
browsing through the taxonomic classification
of the European Register of Marine Species
(ERMS) – and enables the user to list all places
located in a particular area. Important sources
of information are: the International Hydro-
geographic Organisation (IHO) Limits of
Oceans and Seas, the IHO-IOC GEBCO
(International Hydrogeographic Organisation
– International Oceanographic Commission
General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans)
Gazetteer of undersea feature names, the
Exclusive Economic Zones, the Large Marine
Ecosystems of the World, the FAO Fishing
Areas and the ASFA Codes.
While ERMS is the taxonomic backbone of the
MarBEF data system, the European Marine
Gazetteer can be seen as the geographical
backbone that is connected to the other
databases. For example, users can search for all
datasets holding data on a specific area, and
subsequently find the people and the
institutes that are actively doing research in
that region. The fact that the place names are
related to each other makes it possible to
automatically display all the information of the
underlying sub-areas. The gazetteer is thus
used to describe a species distribution in
ERMS. This means that, through a single data
entry, a species can be listed as belonging to,
for example, Italy, the Adriatic Sea, the
Mediterranean, and Europe.
VLIZ has developed an online Maritime
Boundaries Geodatabase (http://www.vliz.be/
vmdcdata/marbound) that includes the shape-
files of all the Exclusive Economic Zones
(EEZs) of the World. By adding this layer on
top of the species distribution data in the
European Ocean Biogeographic Information
System (EurOBIS), national species check-lists
can easily be created.
MarBEF has played an important role in the
development of the gazetteer. Through the
involvement of VLIZ in several other
international projects, the initial geographical
scope is now expanding, covering many more
locations from all the world’s oceans (e.g.
Antarctica through the SCAR-MarBIN project,
http://www.scarmarbin.be/) and now includes
all the major marine places of the world. Today,
the VLIMAR gazetteer holds nearly 18,000
place names. The further development of the
gazetteer is a continuous activity for the
MarBEF data management team.
Websites
European Marine Gazetteer
www.marbef.org/data/gazetteer.php
VLIZ Marine Gazetteer
www.vliz.be/vmdcdata/vlimar
VLIZ Maritime Boundaries Geodatabase
www.vliz.be/vmdcdata/marbound
References
Claus, S, Deckers, P, Vanhoorne, B,
Hernandez, F and Vanden Berghe, E (2006).
Developments and geographic interface of the
VLIMAR gazetteer. In: Mees, J and Seys, J (eds)
(2006): VLIZ Young Scientists’ Day, Brugge,
Belgium 31 March 2006: Book of Abstracts. VLIZ
Special Publication 30, pp25.
Deckers, P and Vanden Berghe, E (2006). The
VLIZ Maritime Boundaries Geodatabase as a
biogeographical tool. In: 2006 ICES Annual
Science Conference, 19-23 September; Business
meetings 17-26 September, 2006; Maastricht,
The Netherlands. Handbook, Contributions,
Agendas and Orders of the Day: Abstracts, pp228.
Ward Appeltans,
MarBEF Data Management Office
Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ), Belgium
Email: data@marbef.org
The higher classification of oceans and seas in the European Marine Gazetteer is based on the chart
Limits of Oceans and Seas 3rd edition (1953), published by the International Hydrogeographic
Organisation (IHO).
The gazetteer contains coordinates, sources of information, precision and relations. A dynamic map
provides a visual interface.


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