COASTAL ENVIRONMENTAL BASELINE PROGRAM

Coastal Environmental Baseline Project

The Coastal Environmental Baseline Program is part of the Oceans Protection Plan. It consists of collecting, standardizing, managing and disseminating data from research projects that focus on six coastal environments across Canada that could be influenced by potential increases in marine shipping or other development.

Different types of data are collected, including biodiversity, physico-chemistry, contaminants, etc. SLGO works in close collaboration with more than 40 partners in order to characterize these coastal areas and to establish data management standards which will subsequently be useful to the oceanographic community.

The first phase of the project was run from 2019 to 2023. The coastal areas included in this phase were:

Port of Vancouver (British Columbia)
Port of Prince Rupert (British Columbia)
The St. Lawrence Estuary (Quebec)
Port of Saint John (New Brunswick)
Placentia Bay, (Newfoundland and Labrador)
Iqaluit (Nunavut)

The second phase of th project will be launched soon. The targeted coastal areas are:

Vancouver (British Columbia)
Prince Rupert (British Columbia)
North Coast – St. Lawrence Estuary and Gulf and West Anticosti Island (Quebec)
North Coast – West Fundy (New Brunswick)
Fortune Bay (Newfoundland and Labrador)
Iqaluit and Qikiqtarjuaq (Nunavut)

This initiative also helps to promote citizen data, which is rarely shared and reused, but which has significant potential for improving knowledge and informed decision-making by communities.

To view the data

You would like to have a look at the data collected as part of the Coastal Environmental Baseline Program?

Project Report

To consult the milestones achieved to date under the Coastal Environmental Baseline Program, please refer to this document. It also contains key reflections on the management of sensitive data and announces our organization’s intentions regarding the development of the IT infrastructure.