The Crown Estate has upgraded its online Marine Data Exchange (MDE), a database of offshore renewables survey data, research and evidence.
The free-to-access online database now includes over 2300 survey campaigns collated from feasibility through to decommissioning studies across the offshore wind, marine aggregates and wave and tidal sectors.
The new-look MDE is the result of 12 months of testing and refining with a wide variety of users.
Improvements include a more user-friendly and intuitive design, improved search speed and browsing functionality, easier navigation for those trying to access a specific data set, and improved data visualisation capabilities.
It also hosts outputs from the Offshore Wind Evidence and Change programme, evidence projects commissioned by the Crown Estate, and outputs from the Crown Estate’s spatial analysis and plan-level Habitats Regulations Assessments.
Since the emergence of the first operational offshore wind farms in the UK just over 20 years ago, The Crown Estate’s offshore wind customers have agreed to share data collated throughout the lifecycle of their projects, in a bid to support the future sustainable growth of the offshore renewables industry.
This led to the creation of the online Marine Data Exchange (MDE) in 2013, which has grown to become the biggest database of offshore renewables survey data in the world, holding over 200 terabytes of survey data from offshore projects across England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
The Crown Estate said the MDE’s “wealth of freely available, high-quality” data gives those involved in planning offshore projects a valuable head start in understanding potential interactions and impacts, which can ultimately lower the risk of offshore development.
The new features also make it easier for users to identify knowledge gaps – and to address those gaps for the benefit of the wider sector – and to gain greater insights into the evidence which informs the Crown Estate’s decisions and processes.