During the upcoming Esri Ocean GIS Forum, Dr. Mark Fonseca of CSA Ocean Sciences, Inc will describe both the technical and procedural challenges of transforming the offshore environ-mental impact assessment (EIA) process into a modern, on-line process.

Dr. Fonseca is the Vice President - Science at CSA. His co-authored talk “Transforming the Off-shore Environmental Impact Assessment Process into a Web-based Environment: Opportuni-ties for Innovation” will describe attempts to shift impact assessments of the Outer Continental Shelf areas of the U.S. into a geospatial framework. The goal of this framework is to better and more succinctly understand the information available for guiding the impact assessment pro-cess. The offshore energy industry is also adopting methods to enable data used in impact as-sessments to be centralized and improve decision-making. He will describe the challenges of applying innovative approaches to serve both markets, including ArcGIS-associated data host-ing, 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.