JNCC - Marine Feature, Activity and Sensitivity Tool

Marine environments are highly sensitive and often poorly understood, and the UK supports a huge amount and diversity of maritime activity that affects these environments in different ways. There is increased interest in the use of marine space and resources around the UK, from offshore wind to macroalgae production, and ongoing energy infrastructure projects that involve significant conduit laying, vessel activity and offshore construction. There is also an increasing pace of change to practise in traditional maritime activities. The way we interact with the sea is changing, and the FeAST tool could play more of a role in supporting assessments of impact and influencing the decision making process for planning particular marine installations and permitted activities if it were made more accessible and user friendly.

Generally this project went smoothly from start to finish - although the stakeholder group was quite broad (including representatives from Nature Scot, JNCC, Marine Scotland, SEPA and Scottish Natural Heritage) we had good access to stakeholders and there were no issues in receiving direction and input at key milestones. The data modelling presented some intricate challenges, particularly around data entities that existed only as a result of one thing acting on another (e.g a marine pressure acting on a feature, creating a unique new data entity). These were interesting project components rather than serious blockers.

Outputs were delivered on time and to budget with the production of a Discovery Report, digital UX wireframes that had been built collaboratively with the user stakeholders, and a full functional specification that was somewhat extra to the scope of the original project, but which would allow any following build phase to get up to speed quickly.

An important contribution we made to the replacement project overall was to influence thinking on how the redeveloped tool could be developed, and specifically that a Commercial Off the Shelf (COtS) package was unlikely to be appropriate. We worked with digital partner Verse to develop the solution specification which was based on best practice headless infrastructure and allowed fully bespoke database and front end development. We were successful in the project and went on to support our project partner’s subsequent bid for the rebuild project, which resulted in Verse going on to work on the delivery project for the revised tool, implementing the recommendations and functional design from this phase.

The project was very satisfying in terms of being able to engage with some intricate marine-focused data modelling, and working with a diverse group of stakeholders from academia, conservation, and government-funded agencies. The project led us to a wider appreciation of the network of agencies and professional bodies involved in the protection and regeneration of the UK’s marine environment, and our team has gone on to develop further interest and expertise in specific marine activities such as macroalgae cultivation. We’re very interested in pursuing future project opportunities that are positioned for positive impact in the context of the UK and international marine environments.