"Last year’s Marine Bill White Paper and the forthcoming Climate Change Bill demonstrates the ever increasing concern over flooding and rising sea levels. This makes it more important than ever that researchers and academics are able to access accurate, up to date information about the marine and coastal environments," comments Dr Mike Osborne, Managing Director of SeaZone Solutions, who provides marine data for Digimap.

The launch of the marine version enables Digimap, a key academic resource, to add to its current portfolio of land-based data provided by Ordnance Survey and the British Geological Survey. This means that users will now have access to a total coastal zone management package.

The marine images enable users to view raster marine maps and to access 'hydrospatial' images, consisting of six highly detailed layers of marine data, covering bathymetry and elevation, natural and physical environments, structures and obstructions, socio-economic and marine use, conservation - environment information, and climate and oceanography.

Having a consistent, total package is important. One of the positive aspects of the different datasets - marine and land use - sharing the same platform is that many users will already be familiar with the techniques and tools required to access the data. This means people can start to use and understand the maps without a new learning curve or additional software.

Tim Riley of EDINA Digimap comments: “It’s exciting that we are now able to provide three of the key base datasets for coastal zone management. And as work progresses to bring these traditionally separate datasets into harmony, Digimap will pass on the benefits to its users in higher and further education.”

Lorraine Estelle, CEO of JISC Collections, comments: “Academics, researchers and students across many different subject areas will find Marine Digimap immensely useful. JISC has made a considerable investment in digital map data and the Digimap platform for a number of years now. We’re hoping to repeat the successes of the other collections, such as the Geology Digimap, which launched in January 2007 and now has over 8,500 active users.”

JISC funds the Digimap suite of services and EDINA - one of the JISC national data centres. JISC is a joint committee which brings together further and higher education funding bodies, and is responsible for supporting innovative ICT provision in education.