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The Hudson River Estuary and the Port of New York/New Jersey play an essential, multi faceted role in the lives of its twelve million inhabitants. The Estuary is also an essential part of a complex ecosystem in which a range of fauna and flora cohabit with man.

As a system, the Estuary and the surrounding areas contain ecological, physical and political components that both drive the system and are driven by the system. These components and driving forces include natural processes operating on time scales ranging from hours to thousands of years, and human processes with time scales of days to decades.

The estuary is not unique: there are many similar urban estuaries around the world: places where ports and large cities exist at the mouths of large rivers - and where there is a continuous effort to reconcile the needs of the environment, commerce and the general wellbeing of society.

The success or failure of these urban estuaries has impacts which far exceed their physical extent, and it is imperative that we understand these systems. Once the understanding is there, the system can be managed in such a way as to maximize the benefits and minimize the negative impacts.

However, the understanding requires us to consider the interplay between the different elements driving the system: politics, economy, environment and science. Only by taking into account all the elements of the problem can we arrive at a comprehensive management approach. This problem is possibly one of the most complex ones one can work at, yet it is also ultimately one of the most satisfying ones as its solution will have long term positive results for society.

There are many issues which need to be addressed to manage the system. However, one of the main problems in understanding and managing the estuary is the following: We do not have a comprehensive system for retrieving, analyzing and integrating data and information relating to the Hudson Estuary, for use by scientists, decision-makers and the public.

This system (called the Virtual Estuary and its subset, the New York Virtual Harbor) is what we have set out to create.

The Virtual Estuary: concepts and elements

The concept that underlies the Virtual Estuary (i.e. develop an interdisciplinary scientific tool for studying a complex system) is not new; e.g. the work done by NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in the Vents Program (Wright, Fox et al. 1997) has a similar philosophy and provides a template for the creation of an information management system and infrastructure.
However, the system we want to create is more complicated than one that is to be used only by scientists and would thus require a high degree of scientific literacy; the Virtual Estuary is intended to serve a broad consistency and must meet the following cirteria:

1. Provide an information management structure and data exchange platform for estuarine data
2. Allow the monitoring of the system behavior and evolution
3. Allow coupling of multidisciplinary models to the data, and provide a platform for showing the results of the modeling efforts
4. Meet scientific, managerial, and general public needs for information and practical use of information.

In theory, with infinite resources and time, an enormous computerized model could be developed to represent the estuary. However, the routes and methods chosen in developing such an application would be outdated by the time that the program was put into practical use (if and when this time came about). The route we selected (Figure 1) is to develop a combination of a centralized metadata set, an interface to this dataset, and a program that allows for basic query and visualization functions and linking with distributed modeling. Effectively only the metadata is centralized, whereas each underlying dataset can "live" on a different server. By maintaining the metadata as a central interface between all modeling, querying and visualization operations consistency is assured between models; also it ensures that all users work from the same dataset. This structure provides economies of scale: there is of course only one sea surface temperature, bathymetry, geology - and once the information is validated, it can be centrally managed and distributed

Figure 1. Schematic layout of the Virtual Estuary. Rather than being a clearinghouse of data (which only facilitates data access) the Virtual Estuary provides an information manipulation and extraction layer that provides customized options for the different users. By constructing the application as a distributed computing web application, both "local data" (i.e., non public domain data) as well as distributed data can be easily used.

One component of the Virtual Estuary is an interface that provides access to this data (modeled or even identical to a Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) data clearinghouse). This provides access to the data for researchers who are only interested in getting the data. However, the core of the Virtual Estuary is a web based interface which provides a query/modeling/visualization interface to the data. This interface (which is a slightly modified piece of commercial GIS software) performs a multitude of tasks:

1. Provides a spatial image of different datasets (either canned images or on demand maps)
2. Provides an analysis tool for the different datasets (again, either on demand or with customized buttons)
3. Provides an interface to a range of models provided by various users.

Current status of the Virtual Estuary

As of March 2001 the online component of the Virtual Estuary includes a data clearinghouse and an online mapping application which allows users to do online mapping of the whole estuary. Other components (ftp access to data, interaction with real time data, interaction with models) will be added in the near future.