The German Federal Maritime and Hydrographic Agency (BSH) works in the area of offshore wind energy with the MARLIN web application implemented by SCOPELAND. The so-called Marine Life Investigator collects, processes and evaluates biological data of the marine environment to enable an environmentally friendly and sustainable development of offshore wind energy. With the help of the low-code platform SCOPELAND, manual and thus time-consuming processes were replaced by an efficient and effective web application.

Making Large Volumes of Data Available in Uniformly High Quality

Information from ship- and aircraft-based surveys of birds, bottom-dwelling communities, fish, and marine mammals represents the most important assessment basis for achieving environmentally friendly and sustainable development of offshore wind energy. In addition, knowledge of the marine environment is rapidly increasing in the form of extensive biological data and information. As a result, the technical requirements for environmental assessment are also increasing and it is becoming necessary to evaluate the large amounts of data across wind farms and across several years.

Under these requirements, the Scopeland Technology team started the development of MARLIN in October 2017, at which time the BSH did not have a centralized system for data import and processing, nor for automated quality checking of all submitted information. Incoming biological data were manually checked for quality. In the future, it should be possible to create various filter criteria, set spatial and temporal filters, and produce map displays during data evaluation.

From manual processes to efficient web application

Project coordinator Gregor von Halem from the BSH's Inspection and Monitoring Unit highlights the benefits of the web application: "MARLIN allows us to use biological data and information from industry offshore projects and BSH preliminary site investigations for environmental assessments more efficiently and effectively.

The previous manual checking of incoming biological data has been replaced by a web upload with automated and transparent incoming checks. Biological evaluations are accelerated by a browser-based application. With just a few clicks, evaluations are now produced that would otherwise have taken several hours. Embedded dynamic map displays enable biologists at the BSH to perform targeted spatial analyses."

Reliable and complex system

MARLIN was designed in several special modules and has the following technical features:

• Tos Importer for importing a wide variety of Excel formats.
• PlausiGenerator for creating complex checks on all data fields to ensure data quality
• ImportMagic for importing the validated data into a generalized data model for mapping the various protected assets
• Freely configurable templates
• Configuration of exports such as maps, charts and tables with free filter criteria and spatial and temporal searches

Thanks to the MARLIN application, which was successfully developed with low-code, the BSH now has a reliable and complex system for collecting and analyzing its data. The present project results demonstrate how target-oriented the low-code approach is for the development of large, sophisticated software solutions.