Open source tools to support Integrated Coastal Management and Maritime Spatial Planning

This paper describes an open source suite of libraries and tools to support research activities on marine and coastal environment. The suite was initially implemented for the ADRIPLAN portal, an integrated web platform aimed at supporting Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP) activities and other activities concerning the managing of marine environment for the Adriatic-Ionian region. The main elements of the implemented solutions are: i) a GeoNode implementation for sharing geospatial datasets and maps; ii) a new python library (RectifiedGrid) that facilitates the work with geographical grid data; iii) a new python library (MSPTools) to perform spatial analysis and assessment of human uses, pressures and the potential impact of maritime and coastal activities on the environment; iv) a new GeoNode plugin (called GeoNodeMSPTools) that provides interactive widgets to set up the analyses and to visualize and explore the results. The MSP Tools and the developed software have been released as FOSS under the GPL3 license and are currently under further development.