Research server National Park Hunsrück-Hochwald

In large-scale protected areas, applied, implementation-oriented research is carried out alongside traditional monitoring. These are in social science as well as in economic and environmental science research fields. For the Hunsrück-Hochwald National Park, it is already to be expected in the medium term that a large number of topics will be dealt with within the framework of individual research activities, in expert reports or in larger interdisciplinary research projects. In order to promote the exchange of knowledge and communication across projects, it is important that experts and the interested public can obtain timely information about completed, ongoing and planned research projects and the results obtained. Furthermore, it is important for all participants to quickly get an up-to-date overview of the existing spatial information, the measurement networks operated and permanent observation areas.

In order to enable a central and efficient entry into the national park's literature and data landscape, a research server was designed, built and further developed at the Institute for Software Systems. This is made available to all research groups as a scientific information portal. Costly, redundant data collection and time-consuming research work are thus avoided. In addition, the research being carried out will become more transparent and potential synergy effects can be used more easily.

The research server was built using free components. The central component here is the PortalU software, which is also used in several federal states for the operation of nationwide environmental information systems. In the first stage of development, the detailed design and implementation of a meta-database were carried out. With this component, the research server is intended to answer users' questions about who has what information where and how it can be accessed. Another component is an OGC-compliant web map service. As a display service, it presents the available geoinformation to the users system-independently via the Internet. For the integration and further local evaluation of the geodata, a download service for vector data will be implemented, which will be expanded in a further stage by the provision of raster data (e.g. terrain model).

The system is operated by the State Office for Data and Information Rhineland-Palatinate (LDI) and is supervised by the National Park Office. In the meantime, the Hainich National Park and Black Forest have also joined the project.

Learn More