2013 - University College Cork

MESMA: MONITORING AND EVALUATION OF
SPATIALLY MANAGED AREAS
Research Centre/Department/School: CMRC
Start Year: 2009
End Year: 2013
Funding Body: EU FP7
Researchers: Yassine Lassoued, Ali Al-Othman, Ying Wu
Contact PI: Gerry Sutton (Gerry.sutton@ucc.ie)
Website: http://www.mesma.org/
Research Projects Listing
The MESMA project focuses on marine spatial planning and aims to produce integrated management
tools (concepts, models and guidelines) for monitoring, evaluation and implementation of
Spatially Managed Areas (SMAs). The project results will support integrated management plans
for designated or proposed sites with assessment methods based on European collaboration. The
main tasks in the project are information analysis, the development of a generic framework (Fig
1), the testing and evaluation of this framework through case-studies and the development of a
toolbox. A significant proportion of the effort will be centered on the case studies within five geographical
regions: the North Sea, Baltic, Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Black Sea. This approach
makes it possible to compare pressures on an inter-regional level (e.g. Offshore wind farms in the
North Sea, Black Sea and Baltic), or a multi-pressure level for a specific region (e.g. SMA in Fishing,
Wind-energy, Geo-hazards and Tourism in the Black Sea).
KEY PUBLICATIONS & OUTPUTS
The project is now in year 3 of 4 and a number of peer reviewed publications and key reports
are have been published. To access these and other up-to-date developments refer to the project
main website http://www.mesma.org/. CMRC is leading a work package (WP5) that is developing
and demonstrating the deployment of Web-based GIS infrastructures and standards for discovering,
accessing, managing, and manipulating multiple types of marine spatio-temporal data that
are required for monitoring and evaluation of SMAs. In accordance with current best practice
used by the existing infrastructures e.g. EMODNET, the MESMA infrastructure adapts, uses and
promotes specific international standards such as EU Inspire, and ISO) that govern the way the
datasets are structured described and documented through thematic classification schemes and
metadata inventories. One of the main outputs of the project will be a web portal that integrates
the MESMA Work package and case-study elements.
MESMA web portal Architecture
RESEARCH PROJECTS
3