European directives, such as the Water Framework Directive and Marine Strategy Directive, require member states to reach good ecological status in their coastal and inland waters. In the Baltic Sea this goal has not yet been achieved.
Spatial planning is a process that aims for the mitigation of the impacts of human activities and eventual improvement of the state of the environment through coordination and implementation of various practices and policies. Thus, one important action for the improvement of the state of the Baltic Sea is to improve the territorial and maritime spatial planning capabilities of the organizations operating in the area. The goal of the project is to develop an integrated data approach to obtain a full view of the essential processes of land and coastal water areas by combining various currently available satellite data sources, in situ observations and model predictions about dynamic landcover and water quality characteristics.
The BalticAIMS project will reach this goal through the following technical objectives:
- Identify suitable environmental data and GIS materials.
- Integrate, process and store thematic information.
- Create the data access, visualization and analysis systems and tools.
The relevance of the Marine Spatial Planning techniques supported by EO to assess changes in environment due to agriculture, land use, aquaculture and changes in runoff will be demonstrated for selected areas in Finland, Sweden, Germany and Poland.
The project is under ESAs EO4society programme and part of the Baltic Regional Initiative activities. It is also linked to the Baltic Earth community.
Project partners
- Finnish Environment Institute SYKE (FI);
- Brockmann Consult GmbH (BC), (DE);
- Brockmann Geomatics (BG), (SE).