Sharing shipping data with WIO Symphony
A long list of the key actors contributes to a marine spatial planning tool in the Western Indian Ocean. HUB Ocean is one of them.
WIO Symphony is a web tool that supports ecosystem-based marine spatial planning in the Western Indian Ocean. It was co-developed by a team led by the Swedish Agency for Marine and Water Management (SwAM) and 10 member states of the Nairobi convention the Nairobi convention. The Nairobi Convention has 10 member states: Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, South Africa, Comoros, Madagascar, Seychelles, Mauritius and Réunion, France. The NC Secretariat and the countries ensure that the WIO Symphony tool is tailored to meet the specific user needs. A dataset from HUB Ocean is central to this marine spatial planning tool and provides valuable shipping data.
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Marine spatial planning is an approach to plan human activities in the ocean to ensure that the sea’s resources are used in a sustainable way for the benefit of all. It also helps reduce conflict between stakeholders in the blue economy. But to do so efficiently, we need to take into account a lot of variables from a lot of spheres across the ocean economy. To name a few:
• Discharges from industry
• Dredging and landfilling
• Cables and pipes
• Navigation
• Tourism and leisure
• Hunting and fishing
• Aquaculture
• Windfarms
WIO Symphony calculating environmental impact
Using more than 80 ecology and human activity maps, WIO Symphony calculates environmental impact from human activities and points out those under specific pressure. It also lets you create maps, visualise data, compare different planning options and test scenarios – how different planning and policy measures may change the environmental impact in an area.
Ecosystem map showing the Baleen whale habitat, modelled using Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS) data
Pressure map showing underwater noise and its intensity, modelled from AIS shipping data provided by HUB Ocean
To do this, the tool combines three elements:
maps showing 52 ecosystem components. These are the most important animals and plants associated with a territory and their habitats.
maps showing 48 environmental pressures from human activities. Examples are fishing, underwater noise, emissions, etc.
a sensitivity score indicating how sensitive each ecosystem component is to each of the pressures. It comes from a group of about 50 experts and scholars.
How we contribute to WIO Symphony
To calculate one of the pressures, WIO Symphony uses a dataset leveraged by HUB Ocean's Ocean Data Platform. Through a partnership with Global Fishing Watch (GFW), we receive streams of Automatic Identification System (AIS) data from various sources, for example, private AIS data providers or government agencies. This data is processed into “ship emission grids” and “vessel density grids” that are easy to use in geospatial information systems like WIO Symphony.
Interface of WIO Symphony showing risk of impact from shipping activities on the marine ecosystem. Blue = low impact, Red = high impact.
“Processing of AIS and emission data is a big data challenge,” says head of the Ocean Data Platform Jo Øvstaas. “Exact figures are not publicly available, as different AIS data providers have different levels of coverage and access to AIS signals. It will usually be between tens of millions or billions of points per day. In the Ocean Data Platform, we process data from ~250 000 individual ships each hour 365 days a year.”
As a result, WIO Symphony uses map layers based on this data to show pressures from shipping, e.g. underwater noise, pollution and ship strikes. The user can easily combine it with layers showing ecosystem components to understand the balance between human pressures and nature ecosystems.
The list of organisations that contribute data to WIO Symphony along with us features NOAA, NASA, IUCN, Global Fishing Watch, GEBCO, Copernicus Programme, WWF, the Nature Conservancy, Seabed 2030, and more.
“Without the substantial contribution from global providers of spatial information such as HUB Ocean, science to policy initiatives like WIO Symphony would not be feasible due to the major undertaking of accessing and processing enormous quantities of data,” says Gustav Kågesten, Senior State Geologist at Geological Survey of Sweden.
“The ocean space is still poorly mapped and a lot of work is to be done, but responsible governance cannot wait for perfect data. We work to provide managers and decision-makers with the best available information to govern a sustainable blue economy for the ocean we need and want.”