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Archived at CCDC
CARICOMP Program
Northern
Caribbean
Node of GCRMN
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BACKGROUND
The
Caribbean Coastal Data Centre (CCDC), previously the Data Management
Centre (DMC) of the Caribbean Coastal Marine Productivity Program (CARICOMP), was
initially established in 1993 with funding from the McArthur Foundation.
To reflect its enlarged vision of a regional data archiving, management
and access centre, the CCDC now archives and manages data from local
and regional monitoring programs, which includes CARICOMP, the Caribbean Planning for Adaptation to Global Climate Change
Project (CPACC), the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico Rapid Reef Assessment
Program (AGRRA) - dataset from Jamaica and Mexico, and Coastal Water Quality
Improvement Project (CWIP).
The
functions of the CCDC are:
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To
provide data archival support to various regional and international
marine monitoring programs, including data entry and error-checking
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To
design and develop appropriate databases to facilitate easy retrieval
of data and the exploration of relationships in the datasets
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To
disseminate data on a timely basis to facilitate the production of
reports and summaries as required by the monitoring programs
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To
act as a focal point for communication, coordinating and facilitating discussion
between researchers, managers and various interest groups
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To
create links with global monitoring programmes such as GCRMN, AGRRA,
CPACC, CARICOMP and data
archiving centres such as ICLARM’s ReefBase and National
Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
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CCDC's
PLANS FOR THE FUTURE
In
addition to storing data from these important regional and international
monitoring programmes, CCDC plans to:
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Develop
databases to house data from Kingston Harbour, Kingston, Jamaica including the following
datasets collected through a series of projects in the period
1990-2000. These datasets include data on:
-Physical oceanographic data, e.g. bathymetry,
salinity,
temperature
-Water
quality data e.g. N, P levels, phytoplankton levels
-Meteorological
data
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Design and develop a coastal metadata
system. Metadata or “data about data” describe the content,
quality, currency, availability, and other characteristics of data.
This allows researchers, managers, and other interested persons
to discover what research is being done and to assess
the suitability of the data for a particular application. Such a
system would allow researchers and funding agencies to understand more
clearly where gaps in datasets exist, establish priorities in terms of
research needs and match these with available funds. The benefits
would be a more efficient utilization of resources (both human and
financial) for research in the coastal zone. Eventually this project
could be expanded to the Caribbean region, thus establishing a
region-wide metadata system.
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