RI Aquaculture Initiative updates map server

June 15, 2005, WAKEFIELD — The Coastal Resources Management Council’s Rhode Island Aquaculture Initiative (RIAI) has again updated its online Aquaculture, Fisheries and Habitat Map Server. The site now includes comprehensive, user-friendly interactive maps on public information including beaches, public access points, recreational and commercial fishing, wildlife conservation and parks.

The site has been operational for three years and averages almost 1,000 hits a day.

The RIAI is a collaboration of federal, state, university and industry partners working together to grow the aquaculture industry in Rhode Island. One of the first projects funded by the initiative was to enhance an ongoing mapping project that grew out of the CRMC Working Group on Fisheries and Aquaculture Regulations. The map server is the product of this group.

The need to chart the uses of Rhode Island’s coastal and offshore waters has long been apparent. As the population continues to grow, more conflicting uses will be proposed for waters already heavily used for a wide variety of interests, commercial and recreational. The shoreline itself is also extensively used for recreation, and moorings are plentiful just off the shore.

The purpose of the current charts produced by the working group is to identify various areas of state waters that are used for fishing and aquaculture. Future work will include identification of all the stakeholders and areas of the state’s waters that they utilize. The primary goal of this map server, therefore, is to further refine the knowledge base on the current uses of Rhode Island’s coastal and marine waters, which is critical to the planning of any future development or activities that might use this resource.

This is the second major update of the map server by the Environmental Data Center at the University of Rhode Island. Among the changes and improvements to the interactive internet map server, the legend combining multiple data sets like eelgrass, Block Island and Narragansett Bay recreational fishing and Narragansett Bay and South Coast water classes have been simplified. Recreational and commercial fisheries, interactive maps and image maps of lobster migration, shellfish disease testing, public access points, parks, beaches, conservation areas and boat ramps, marina information and more can be found at the site. In addition, different types of public access points to the bay have been added, as well as more sophisticated printing options.

There is also a new data download site, http://www.narrbay.org/ for housing Rhode Island marine data for the public which is not available through the RI Geographic Information System site. There is also a new area where the Narragansett Bay buoy monitoring data is available, along with Nu-Shuttle data, http://www.narrbay.org/d_projects/nushuttle/shuttletree.htm. These maps show bay conditions taken by a monthly survey for the past six years. For more information, contact Dave Alves, CRMC’s Aquaculture Coordinator, at dalves@crmc.ri.gov.