How ESRI is supporting the marine GIS professional

If there is one thing that’s important in seabed mapping, it’s location. The location of seamounts, trenches, ocean ridges, and continental slopes, to name but a few features. Location tells us where potential hazards exist, where unique characteristics lie, and where communities of marine life may thrive deep beneath the waves.

When it comes to understanding how seabed features form, why they change, what life they support, how different human activities may impact ocean life and processes and vice versa, location is key and also only part of the story. Patterns and relationships to other attributes also matter. To understand those, we can harness GIS for analysis across domains.

GIS – geographic information systems – are digital tools that allow us to store, manage, analyse, visualise, and interpret geographic information. Through GIS, we can explore geography, uncover spatial relationships, detect trends and patterns, analyse changes over time, and make predictions. Crucially, we can use those insights to make human activities on the ocean safer and more sustainable.

Arguably, the most influential of GIS technologies have come from Esri, a US-based company founded in 1969. Originally created as a land-use consulting firm, Esri’s GIS products support science, government, and industry management activities worldwide. The company has committed to using its expertise to help solve the world’s most complex problems – including those related to the ocean.

Towards a common goal

In 2021, Esri and the Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project made a formal agreement to work collaboratively towards the goal of mapping the entire ocean floor in high resolution. “With experts in geographic science, software development, and data analytics, the work of Esri will no doubt greatly support our mission of compiling all bathymetric data of the entire global ocean floor by 2030,” Jamie McMichael-Phillips, Director of the Seabed 2030 Project, said.

This November, Esri is hosting the 24th GIS Day - a global event that this year celebrates the GIS professional. Those professionals include marine scientists, hydrographers, maritime professionals, and others working in the marine environment with what has recently been branded as “Hydrospatial Data.” In addition to the analytical and mapping tools incorporated within their web-based, Enterprise, and desktop GIS software, Esri has introduced a suite of products that allow ocean GIS professionals to get the most out of seabed data.

An ocean basemap

Esri offers a diverse range of basemaps – a map or layer that provides some context or background to the rest of the geographic data for rapid visualisation. For example, you can have basemaps that show major city locations, road networks, contour lines, satellite imagery or an aerial view. For marine professionals, Esri offers the World Ocean Basemap. Compiling ocean data from the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO), the International Hydrographic Office-UNESCO Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IHO-IOC) GEBCO Gazetteer of Undersea Feature Names, and National Geographic with topographic information from Garmin, HERE, and Esri, the World Ocean Basemap provides information such as water body names as well as showing features such as canyons, trenches, and the continental shelf.

A living atlas

Launched in 2023, the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World – a collection of ready-to-use maps, apps, and data layers created by Esri and the wider GIS community. The Living Atlas contains a range of GEBCO-derived products, such as Bathymetry contours at 500-meter intervals, a ‘difference’ product that shows where the GEBCO data differs between updates, and a depth zone product which shows the different zones in the ocean (the Epipelagic zone, the Mesopelagic zone, the Bathypelagic zone, the Abyssopelagic zone, and the Hadal zone). New bathymetric products are added to the Living Atlas as and when they are released by GEBCO (currently, once a year). Esri also worked with USGS and others to develop the Ocean Ecological Marine Units (EMU) Explorer application, which visualises and brings quick analysis to the World Oceanographic Database.

Extending ArcGIS’s capabilities

For hydrographic offices, data scientists, port authorities, offshore energy companies and regulators, maritime defence and security agencies, and nontraditional chart producers who need to work with their own bathymetric data, Esri’s dedicated Maritime Development Team have developed two extensions for Esri’s ArcGIS Pro and Enterprise GIS software.

Available as an ArcGIS Pro extension, ArcGIS Bathymetry helps users manage, visualise, model, analyse, and share cleaned and processed bathymetric data. As an example, the Barcelona Port Authority uses ArcGIS Bathymetry to manage its bathymetric assets (hydrographic surveys of the port), determine their operational and berthing depths, and share bathymetric information with the different operations in the port.

The ArcGIS Maritime extension for ArcGIS Pro and ArcGIS Enterprise helps users manage, produce, and share electronic navigational charts that meet IHO standards. In 2022, the Barcelona Port Authority started a project with Esri to automate the production of bathymetric electronic navigational charts. By combining bathymetric survey data collected by the Port Authority with electronic navigational charts produced by the Spanish Hydrographic Institute, these bathymetric electronic navigational charts will support the hazardous work of port pilots, who assist ships moving in and out of the Port. One of the benefits of electronic navigational charts is that they can be updated rapidly with new bathymetric data. Any new survey data the Port adds to the ArcGIS Bathymetry extension feeds automatically into the ArcGIS Maritime extension, updating the charts.

Creating knowledge with data

Seabed data can - and should - play a significant role in managing our activities in the marine environment and guiding conservation and sustainability efforts. However, data on its own is not enough. Through analysis that transforms seabed data into meaningful insights and the development of user-friendly products that facilitate knowledge sharing, GIS tools and professionals are empowering decision-makers, ocean professionals, and stakeholders with the knowledge they need to create a safer, more sustainable ocean.

This story was written for Seabed 2030