Crown Estate Scotland partnership - what it all means
As the Marine Data Exchange welcomes Crown Estate Scotland, here we answer some of your most frequently asked questions.
The Marine Data Exchange (MDE) is a world leading digital platform of marine industry survey data, research and evidence that was created by The Crown Estate in 2013. It contains over 300TB of industry survey data, research and evidence, from a wide range of data types that tell us more about the UK’s seabed, what lies beneath the surface and the amazing marine life that surround our shores. Archaeological sites and shipwrecks, findings from surveys of mammals, studies of fish such as basking sharks, and details on marine peat beds makes the MDE a hugely important resource for academics and others keen to explore the UK’s coastal waters.
By providing a platform for offshore industries to share survey data collected throughout the lifetime of offshore projects and to host new evidence and research, the MDE will be important in accelerating offshore wind, achieving energy security and in driving evidence based decisions that support the protection and enhancement of the marine environment.
Why is Crown Estate Scotland selecting the Marine Data Exchange as its solution for storing marine survey data?
The MDE was developed by The Crown Estate alongside the offshore wind industry over 10 years ago, as a bespoke platform to manage industry survey data and to promote the benefits of data sharing. It currently securely stores and publishes marine survey data collected by offshore projects around England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. The inclusion of marine survey data around Scottish seabed will allow increased data accessibility and shared insights – via a single portal – for offshore renewable developers, researchers, scientists, and other stakeholders.
The recent Independent Report of the Offshore Wind Champion recommended that The Crown Estate and Crown Estate Scotland should align in the use of the MDE as a single UK-wide database for marine environmental data.
How will data from the MDE be shared with other platforms to strengthen the UK evidence base?
The publicly available data held on the MDE is already discoverable on the MEDIN Portal and through OWEKH (the Offshore Wind Evidence and Knowledge Hub). Over the years The Crown Estate have also invested in understanding how thematic data can become better standardised and integrated into national datasets. For example, the publicly available benthic data held on the MDE is integrated into OneBenthic, standardised and distributed to DASSH (DASSH - About). Work is also underway to explore how best to ensure the onward flow of geotechnical, bathymetry, wind resource and cetacean data.
Industry data spans multiple themes within survey campaigns and across offshore projects. The MDE will continue to hold industry data, research and evidence in one place grouped by individual offshore development, evidence project or research campaign. In doing so, the MDE is a valuable resource for industry.
Through Crown Estate Scotland’s partnership with The Crown Estate to use the MDE as its solution for storing marine survey data, data from Scotland will benefit from these existing data flows and the MDE developments already underway to ensure greater adoption of industry data across the UK. Going forward Crown Estate Scotland and The Crown Estate will work together to further develop how the MDE is used and how its data holding is discovered, accessed and reused.
