SAEON hosts the South African Carbon Sinks Atlas

By Leo Chiloane, Program Analyst, SAEON Tweet

The South African Carbon Sinks Atlas can be accessed here. Wim Hugo, SAEON's Chief Data and Information Officer, says that the Carbon Sinks Atlas is part of an ongoing collaboration between SAEON and DEA which consists of several climate data-related initiatives

SAEON has published the online version of the South African Carbon Sinks Atlas on behalf of the Department of Environmental Affairs (DEA).

The data are hosted in the SAEON Open Data Platform.

The atlas consists of model data for carbon stocks and fluxes, summary statistics on carbon sinks, and spatial datasets showing the distribution of carbon sinks and climate-related information. The data and content of the atlas were curated by the CSIR Meraka Institute.

SAEON initially hosted and published spatial data for the first phase of the project, which was completed in 2016. This included a web-based interactive atlas application for data visualisation, web-based metadata, and a data download page linked to the SAEON metadata search facility.

Improvements

Improvements for the current version of the Atlas included categorisation of atlas layers by theme; assignment of digital object identifiers to all the datasets published in the Atlas; and development and hosting of the landing page. For the landing page, SAEON developed an application which allows for the integration of webpages with hardcopy documents and reports for online visualisation.

The applications developed by SAEON are similar to those used in the South African Risk and Vulnerability Atlas  and the BioEnergy Atlas projects hosted and coordinated by SAEON on behalf of the Department of Science and Technology.

The Carbon Sinks Atlas is part of an ongoing collaboration between SAEON and DEA, which consists of several climate data-related initiatives.

“The Atlas is the first tangible output from a recently concluded collaboration agreement between SAEON and DEA,” says Wim Hugo, SAEON's Chief Data and Information Officer, adding that several products of a similar nature are planned for release in 2017.