eDrivers, a Knowledge Platform on 22 Environmental Drivers Present in the St. Lawrence System

eDrivers is an open platform focused on sharing knowledge on the distribution and intensity of drivers. It gathers a community of experts committed to structuring, standardizing and sharing knowledge on drivers of environmental change in support of science and management. The platform currently shares data-based indicators for 22 coastal, climate, fisheries, and marine traffic drivers in the Estuary and Gulf of St. Lawrence. These drivers can be visualized individually or in combination through an interactive web application called eDrivers.

In launching this initiative, our objective is to uphold the highest existing standards of data management and open science. eDrivers is built on four guiding principles: 1) Unity and Inclusiveness; 2) Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability (FAIR); 3) Adaptiveness; 4) Recognition. The project was presented in a publication entitled Characterizing Exposure to and Sharing Knowledge of Drivers of Environmental Change in the St. Lawrence System in Canada in the peer-reviewd journal Frontiers in Marine Science.

It is possible to access through the catalog the layers of 16 different types of stressors:

CLIMATE:

• Acidification
• Hypoxia
• Sea Bottom Temperature Anomalies
• Sea Surface Temperature Anomalies
• Sea Level Rise

COASTAL:

• Aquaculture
• Coastal Development
• Direct Human Impact
• Inorganic Pollution
• Nutrients Input
• Organic Pollution
• Toxic Algae

FISHERIES:

• Commercial Fisheries Intensity

MARINE TRAFFIC:

• Shipping
• Invasive Species
• Marine Pollution