1. GISCO Working Party 25-26 October 2001
GIS for NATURA 2000
Paul Smits, Stephen Peedell, Alessandro Annoni,
European Commission
Directorate General Joint Research Centre
Institute for Environment & Sustainability
Land Use & Land Cover Unit
21020 Ispra (VA), Italy
GISCO Working Party October 2001

2. Presentation Overview
Background on Natura2000
Project Objectives
Project Participants
Progress in Data Validation
Progress in System Design & Development
Future Activities

3. Natura2000 - European Nature Conservation Policy
European network of nature conservation sites designated by Member States under the Birds Directive and the Habitats Directive
Managed by European Commission Directorate General Environment
Specific funding under LIFE ( Nature Conservation Projects, 200M Euro)
Sites EU 15
12% of EU Territory
Organised by Biogeographic Zones
Site list under review until 2004
Enlargement - LIFE projects already underway in Romania

4. Project Objectives Harmonise the existing Natura2000 data
 Acquire additional data
 Collect, model and document user requirements
 Design and test an integrated spatial data model
 Prototype, test and implement GIS applications

5. Project Participants
A collaborative effort between JRC, DG-Environment and Eurostat-GISCO
Supporting agencies:
European Topic Centre on Nature Conservation (ETC-NC) and European Environment Agency (EEA)
Users:
DG Regional Policy
DG Agriculture
DG Transport
Member States
The Citizen

6. Progress in Data Validation
5500 sites validated so far
Ensure integrity between Natura2000 database and digital data
A labour intensive process, assisted by development of GISVAL, a tool developed by JRC in ArcView to provided automatic validation of key spatial parameters
Validation effort has also raised awareness of requirements for GIS-ready data, resulting in improvements in updated and new data provided by MS
This activity must be completed before a site can be published in the official list
Ongoing activity, carried out under contract
Parallel key activity of maintaining catalogue of paper maps (over 10,000 items).

7. GIS Prototype Architecture - Design
JRC analysis of user requirements (focused on DG-ENV)
Logical modelling in UML
Implementation of physical schema at JRC
Currently testing GeoDatabase, and application development in standard Commission GIS environment (Oracle/ESRI)

10. Conclusions & Future Activities
GIS for Natura2000 activity is still dominated by database harmonisation issues
The requirements analysis showed that the priority applications are mostly driven by administrative requirements, reflecting the needs of the DG-ENV users
There is a vast scope for the development of thematic applications, including indicators, modelling & visualisation
Reference data availability at the Natura2000 project scale (1:10,000) remains problematic at European level