The metadata catalogue of the Spanish Institute of Oceanography: a tool to implement the EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD)

Abstract

The Spanish Institute of Oceanography (IEO-CSIC) is responsible, among other aspects, for scientific and technical advice for the Government's fisheries policy as well as for the protection and sustainability of the marine environment. Thus, the IEO-CSIC plays a key role in the implementation of the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD), an EU legislative act that seeks to achieve a good environmental status of European marine waters and protect the resource base on which sustain economic and social activities related to the sea. Under this commission, the IEO-CSIC generates a large amount of marine data characterized by its spatial dispersion during acquisition as well as by its different typology. One of the main tasks is to safeguard data and to disclose what data exists and where, how and when it has been acquired and, in addition, to provide access to that data through the collaboration with different national and international organizations. To this end, the data and metadata are subjected to quality control and formatted for integration into a national Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI). This SDI has a GeoNetwork catalogue (http://datos.ieo.es) with ~ 2800 oceanographic campaigns. The metadata of the campaigns known as Cruise Summary Report (CSR) follow the ISO 19139, and although similar to those reported to the pan European SeaDataNet infrastructure, here they have been adapted following an XSL transformation to facilitate the data discovery to the Spanish community. CSRs constitute the parent metadata for ~ 250 layers associated with the implementation of the MSFD. Thus, the INSPIRE-compliant layers with biological, geological and physical resource data can be found through the catalogue and are linked to the corresponding map services. Finally, relevant metadata for the implementation of the MSFD are harvested in other national infrastructures, as the InfoMar catalogue (http://www.infomar.miteco.es/), promoted by the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge and maintained by the CEDEX.