RACE Data Base : Rapid Assessment of the Coastal Environment

The Calvi Bay, directly accessible since the 70s by STARESO provides the opportunity to reach coastal, pelagic, benthic, deep systems with a manageable cost and ship requirements in a well-preserved zone. The multiparametric and interdisciplinary data-bases now available can be used in studies of ecosystems or processes like ecology of seagrass bed, biodiversity of macroalgae, study of trophic food webs, marine ecotoxicology, impact of climate changes on phyto- and zooplankton dynamics, jellyfish dynamics in changing waters, carbon cycle and air - water CO2 fluxes, statistical data analysis and modelling into assimilation approaches, including nested coastal models, development of ecological quality criteria for measuring ecosystem quality and effectiveness of management applications.

The database now available, is not only an archive of measurements done in the Bay of Calvi during more than 35 years but is really a tool to exploit and to disseminate the results of years of research. For example, averages can be done automatically on various time scales like year, month, decade or day. In addition to the data itself, three tables of metadata give more information about the context where measurements were done (time series, profile, sample).

More than 6 million of measurements are recorded presently in the database from more than 3 000 time series samples or profiles. Some of these measurements are obtained automatically during long-term recording by dedicated devices.

Metadata give more information about measurements for example about the place (station), the data type (Biogeochemical [BC], Biological [B], Physical [P]), the layer type (Atmosphere [Atm], Bedrock or sediment [Bed], Water column [Wc]), the measuring instrument, the research team, etc.

Data are imported in the Database through a web interface. Data exportation is also realised remotely with SQL requests of the pgAdmin software (PostgreSQL tools) or by means of emails at the Database manager (i.e. Marc Binard).