Dr. Fonseca, Vice President CSA Ocean Sciences, Shares Challenges of Modernizing the Offshore Impact Assessment (EIA) Process at Esri Ocean GIS Forum

Dr. Mark Fonseca, Vice President – CSA Ocean Sciences Inc., will describe the many challenges, both technical and procedural of transforming the offshore environmental impact process into a modern, on-line process. His co-authored talk “Transforming the Offshore Environmental Impact Assessment Process into a Web-based Environment: Opportunities for Innovation” will describe attempts to shift impact assessments of the Outer Continental Shelf areas of the U.S. into a geospatial framework.

Image courtesy: Esri Ocean GIS Forum

The goal of this framework is to better and more succinctly understand the information available for guiding the impact assessment process. The offshore energy industry is also adopting methods to enable data used in impact assessments to be centralized and improve decision-making. He will describe the challenges of applying innovative approaches to serve both markets, including ArcGIS-associated data hosting, desktop analysis, and real-time environmental data access.

The Esri Ocean GIS Forum will be held November 4-6, 2015 in Redland, California. For those attending the meeting, please visit our booth (#109) to meet Mark and for more information on these and other CSA services and products. Information regarding the Esri Ocean GIS Forum can be found here.