Sydney Harbour Atlas

Abstract

The estuarine harbour of Sydney, Nova Scotia on the island of Cape Breton has supplied goods and services to humans since the Holocene transgression. As an urban marine ecosystem and strategically located maritime port, it has supported commercial fisheries, military campaigns, and coal and steel industries since the 16th century. Now in the post-industrial era of the Anthropocene, the good burghers of Sydney seek to re-vitalize the commercial port while maintaining the natural assets of the harbour. The recent completions of the tar ponds remediation, the dredge realignment of the shipping channel and creation of a large, new industrial surface, benchmark the next phase in the history of the Harbour. The objective of the Sydney Harbour Atlas (Fig. 1) is to assemble all of the data, information and knowledge of the ecosystem in a secure, accessible and entertaining geo-spatial reference. The purposes of the Atlas are to create an effective decision support tool for planning and management, to catalogue the value of the ecosystem goods and services provided by the harbour and portray them in a manner that informs all stakeholders in its future, and to provide a training and exploration platform for highly qualified personnel in the tertiary education sector. This paper presents the initial effort to create a Sydney Harbour Atlas in a partnership between the Coastal and Ocean Information Network Atlantic's (COINAtlantic) and the Bras D'Or Institute of Cape Breton University. COINAtlantic's mission is to promote, facilitate and influence information management, policies and programs that enhance Integrated Coastal and Ocean Management in Atlantic Canada (Boudreau and McKenna 2014). The development of Version 1 of the Atlas was a case study in a project to support this mission and the Bras D'Or Institute's vision of an atlas with principle funding from the Atlantic Ecosystem Initiative (Environment and Climate Change Canada) and the Canada Green Corps program of the United Nations Association of Canada. The ...