Geospatial Web Services for Responding to Ecological Risks Posed by Oil Spills

The increased maritime oil transportation raises the risk of marine oil spill accidents. An oil spill accident can cause severe harm to the ecosystem. Adequate contingency planning for oil spill and efficient combating operations require ecological data and knowledge to be integrated in tools that facilitate the decision making. A great deal of the decisions required during those operations is of spatial nature, such as defining areas with high priority for safeguarding. Also, real time decision making is required in the operations. All this calls for spatial and on-site accessible tools. We analyze and discuss in this paper geospatial Web services and an application developed for responding to the ecological risk posed by oil spills. The presented case study concerns the Gulf of Finland and the Finnish Archipelago Sea. The results indicate that geospatial services are an efficient method to deliver ecological knowledge and information for oil spill combating.