MMS-SOUTH CAROLINA OFFSHORE SAND RESOURCE AND CRITICAL HABITAT ON-LINE DATABASE: PROVIDING GIS TECHNOLOGY TO THE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SECTORS

In 1992 the South Carolina Task Force on Offshore Resources, with the support of the Minerals Management Service, began compiling a comprehensive database of information on marine resources of the southeastern inner continental shelf, including information pertaining to fisheries, sand resources, and critical habitat. The multi-year, inter-agency cooperative has allowed administrators and scientists from many disciplines to work together in providing the means for a more informed citizenry and a tool by which local and state authorities can view and analyze all relevant information before making decisions regarding public coastal policy. This on-going project has included the work of geologists, marine scientists, biologists, and federal and state agency administrators. It has also served as a platform for undergraduate and graduate level research.

The latest phase in the MMS-South Carolina cooperative culminated with the completion of an inter- active GIS database using the ArcIMS platform. This format, compatible with a wide variety of other ancillary information, facilitates rapid integration of data from MMS-South Carolina with other project- specific data in GIS. The MMS-South Carolina website serves as a parent document, allowing users from both the public and private sectors to readily retrieve information from any web-accessible computer by using a GIS viewer embedded within the site. Also included in the MMS-South Carolina cooperative website are an interpretive, spatially continuous habitat map of the Grand Strand inner continental shelf and a sediment thick- ness map showing the locations of potential sand reservoirs for beach nourishment. The database can be accessed at http://camelot.coastal.edu/Intermar.