North Sea Interactive: a decision:-support tool to guide environmental monitoring by the oil and gas industry

The North Sea Interactive (NSI) project was an 8-month NERC funded project led by Heriot-Watt University, in collaboration with the BGS and NOC. The aim of the project was to develop a new decision-support tool that would translate existing marine environmental data into an interactive mapping product for the offshore oil and gas industry. The objectives of the project were achieved through the integration of the North Sea Benthos database (UKBenthos) with NERC's regional North Sea marine sediment data (BGS) and layers of modelled hydrodynamics (NOC). Aligning the biological, chemical, geological and hydrodynamic datasets in a single GIS product provides the oil industry and government regulators with a practical means of accessing this important archive of environmental data. The North Sea Benthos database (UKBenthos) was developed by Heriot-Watt University on behalf of UKOOA (now Oil and Gas UK) in the 1980s. Alongside macrobenthos, the database includes sediment properties, concentrations of aromatic compounds, total oil and metals. It currently includes data from 1975 to 2011 from 237 platforms and is continually being updated as new survey results are received by Oil and Gas UK.