Case Study · Marine Stewardship Data
Building a Shared View of Marine Stewardship Data
Salish Sea Initiative Interactive Map – Fisheries and Oceans Canada and 33 Participating First Nations
DFO and 33 participating First Nations needed an online platform to support marine stewardship, cumulative effects work, and regional data discovery while maintaining Indigenous data sovereignty. The platform had to accommodate a large body of marine stewardship information and make it understandable across a wide range of users, technical abilities, and bandwidth contexts.Trailmark supported the development of a non-public interactive mapping platform designed for discovery, interpretation, and practical use. The system combines text-based search across map catalogue entries and information panels, time-aware searching for historical and temporal datasets, filtering, charting, saved views, and export/download workflows. These tools help users understand what data exists, where it applies, and how it should be interpreted without requiring advanced GIS expertise.
Interactive map within the Salish Sea Initiative data portal showing eel grass restoration sites, identified through the Salish Sea Nearshore Conservation Project.
The platform was also designed around real-world operating conditions and governance needs. To improve performance in low-bandwidth contexts, many layers are processed as static datasets while still linking back to source systems where appropriate. Role-based permissions, community administrator workflows, and approval processes ensure that communities control what they upload, how it is shared, and who can see it.The result is a shared regional environment where DFO and participating First Nations can discover, interpret, and work with marine stewardship data from a common platform, while ensuring that communities retain authority over their own information.
We built the Salish Sea initiative data portal for various kinds of data visualizations, not just maps. Here is an example showing ocean oxygen levels.