Korean atlas program for coastal pollution response

Abstract

There are many possibilities of which oil spill accident happens by ship' s collision or grounding in coastal area. There are a lot of oilsensitive resources like fisheries, beaches, mud flats, wildlife habitats and so on at coastal area. These geographic features are too various to categorize their environmental sensitivity against marine pollution like oil spill accident. However, in order to respond to an oil pollution incident and to protect a coastal area, necessary datasets related to oil pollutions should be defined and their sensitivities should be classified with a scientific base. And not only precise and useful geographic information but also information application methods are needed. There are some projects which classify the sensitivity of shoreline and publish the ESI (Environmental Sensitivity Index) paper map. The first Korean ESI map was published with paper format and then it had many inconveniences to identify information and to search the specific data. And there were some problems of its sensitivity index which was not proper to Korean coastal environments. In this project, the spatial database of main resources for Korean whole coastal area has been built and GIS program for indentifying spatial information and creating thematic map has been developed. And also sensitivity index of shoreline has been refined and kinds of information for response have been defined. Korean geomorphology features like wide tidal flats and rias(heavily indented) coasts and requirements of responders have been considered. In order to build GIS database, 200 nautical charts were used as the base map and various surveying datasets and 123 satellite images were used. These built items are shoreline, beach, wild habitats, ports, fisheries, industry facilities, response companies and organizations, coastal leisure area and so on. These items have location information as well as various reference attributes. These items and attributes were decided as the results of many discussions with response actors like Korea coast guard and response companies. The key feature of this project is that this atlas is not thick and heavy paper format such as other ESI maps. In order to implement this, GIS database has been built as ESRI shapefile format using ESRI ArcInfo and GIS program has been developed using ESRI MapObjects with Microsoft Visual C++. The final result of project is the integrated atlas of Korean map datasets and GIS program. This atlas includes rich information for supporting response works, convenient and user friendly program and the Korean specific ESI map. This atlas program is all about Korean marine oil-pollution response. Due to this project, when oil spill incident happens, a response commander can decide a response strategy rapidly and wisely with whole understanding of the incident area. And response actors and commander can communicate very precisely through this atlas. This project has made Korean ESI standards, built GIS database for whole coastal area and developed an atlas program for utilizing ESI map. However, there are some problems such as topology errors of base map, periodical map updating and integrating dynamic information like hydrological features and atmospheric conditions. These problems will be solved in near future works.