DATA MANAGEMENT AND DISSEMINATION WITHIN A LARGE COOPERATIVE PROGRAM: THE USGS-SOUTH CAROLINA SEA GRANT CONSORTIUM COASTAL EROSION STUDY

Cooperative regional coastal erosion studies utilize many and often very different types of data to understand coastal geologic frameworks and their influences on coastal dynamics. In order to facilitate a better understanding of these systems and to provide reasonable and useful information to both principal investigators and the public, integrated and reliable data and metadata are needed. The primary goal of this portion of the USGS/SC Sea Grant cooperative is to provide these kinds of information through an online geographic information system and a dynamically hosted web interface. The types of data currently available are new data generated by the PI’s and other data from publicly available local, state, and federal sources. The data include hypsography (bathymetry and topography), roads, modern and historic shorelines, beach profiles, aerial photography, sidescan sonar, geophysical tracklines, and borehole locations and descriptions. The internet site architecture consists of several open source applications to handle data entry, data upload, and a majority of the data access. These applications include the Apache web server (www.apache.org), a PHP interface (www.php.org), and the MySQL database (www.mysql.org). Commercial software is used for the geographic information system (GIS) and web-based mapping products, specifically the ESRI (ArcGIS, ArcIMS, etc.) GIS products. Data are entered directly from the principal investigator through an authentication script and either placed directly online or held until released by the investigator. The advantage of this model is that it is easily modified to support other types of information and data formats. This project will provide coastal managers, decision makers, and the public with interpreted and understandable scientific data so that they may be better prepared to make scientifically sound decisions.