Key national institutions around the Mediterranean trained in spatial data infrastructure and coastal morphodynamics

The second of two sub-regional trainings was successfully completed in October in Istanbul, Turkey, with the participation of 35 experts from a number of Mediterranean countries within the framework of the Climate Variability and Change and ICZM project of the MedPartnership. 

The "Bringing GEOSS services into practice" workshop’s aimed at teaching how to configure, use and deploy a set of open source software to set up a spatial data infrastructure (SDI). Trainees learnt how to publish and share data and metadata and how to register services into the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS). The workshop was widely based on practical exercises. 

 Following this, the Mediterranean Integrated Climate Information Platform (MedICIP), which will be launched in the coming weeks, was presented. The platform is an online tool that helps institutions upload, visualize and export GIS data. It also includes a database on all institutions and experts working on data management and gathering in participating countries and relevant regional and national reports on Climate Variability and ICZM. The platform will be linked with other complementary websites and data portals such as TWAP, PEGASO and Climate Adapt.

The training also focused on calculating beach erosion in the face of increasing climate pressures. The open source, user friendly, integrated software toolbox used, allows an initial assessment of the beach retreat/erosion risk under sea level rise. It is based on the use of different cross-shore analytical and numerical morphodynamic models of varied complexity, which can be used either individually or in combination. This also helps in the calculation of the 100 meter set back zone as articulated in Article 8 of the ICZM Protocol.

Participants welcomed the training, and committed to sharing metadata and also further testing the software tools with real data from beaches in their respective countries.