Environment – Regional Fishery Bodies Viewer

This article covers some work we have done to support information dissemination about Regional Fishery Bodies (RFB) in collaboration with the FIGIS group;. As stated on their website:

“Regional Fishery Bodies (RFB) — a group of States or organizations that are parties to an international fishery arrangement — work together towards the conservation and management of fish stocks.
RFB can play a critical role in promoting longterm sustainable fisheries where international cooperation is required in conservation and management.”

Using Geoserver and OpenLayers we have built with them a comprehensive web based API to create on the fly maps with the relevant information for each resource with just a couple of lines of Javascript code. Maps are embedded in the FIGIS portal, as can be seen here  but also a specific RFB Viewer can be used to quickly show the RFBs’ coverage on a map as shown at this link.

Let’s take a deeper look at the implementation.
Interacting with GeoServer’s WMS module we dynamically build the map with the continental layer, the member countries, the coast lines and the fishery boundaries. The API supports 3 different projections: WGS84 (EPSG:4326), Google Mercator (EPSG:900913) and Polar Stereographic (EPSG:3031).
For each of the regional fisheries body selected in first drop down menu, we generate an embed code as pictured below, this is used by the Fishery department web designers to replace what previously were static images representing the resources distribution and limits. It could also be used by an external website to embed these maps into their site.
More could be said about this project regarding its infrastructure, let’s summarise a few interesting points:

• Background maps are served with GeoWebCache
• Most of the data is stored inside the corporate instance of Oracle Spatial, demonstrating perfect integration of Open Source with COTS
• Extensive usage of CQL filters to drive the dynamic maps is used

It is worth to mention that this work was performed via our GeoSolutions Enterprise Support Service. Therefore, if you’d like to know more about what we could achieve together, do not hesitate and get in touch with us!