News Shoreline Management Plans Policy Database
Shoreline Management Plans Policy Database
Published on 27/01/2012 13:13
All Shoreline Management Plans (SMPs) for England and Wales (status final or draft as of 31/08/2011) have been combined and are now available in a single SANDS database.
The SMP Policy Database provides the capability of visualising the SMP policy units and linking of SMP data and policy statement documents geospatially. Each SMP is represented as a layer in SANDS. Each SMP layer holds the geospatial representation of each individual policy units with an additional SMP Buffer layer showing the colour banding representing policy for the three epochs: short term (0-20 years), medium term (20-50 years) and long term (50-100 years). Each epoch is represented by five different categories, which are colour coded for the values of ‘Hold the Line’ (HTL), Managed Realignment with localised Hold The Line (MR/HTL), ‘Managed Realignment’ (MR), ‘No Active Intervention’ (NAI) and ‘Advance the Line’ (ATL). This enables the user to quickly view SMP policies for an area and access the policy statements for individual units by clicking on the line or banding and opening the associated document from the document links menu.
Note that the policy lines or bands on the map show the preferred shoreline management policy for each period and do not represent either the shoreline or defence locations.
To view the SMP information on the map, click on the SANDS map button. This will show the SMP Buffer Layer for all the SMP Policy Units contained in the database. The SMP Buffer layer will be displayed as set of three polygons representing the three epochs defined in the SMP Policy. To view this information:
- Hovering the mouse over the buffer will show a hint window detailing the Location Name(Policy Unit), the PU number and each of the three epochs.
- At a less detailed scale each section will be labelled with the extent of the Policy Unit, along with the PU number.
- By zooming in on a Policy Unit the labels will also include the SMP policy for each of the three epochs.
- Right clicking on a Policy Unit line will bring up a menu. Selecting SMP Policy Summary will bring up all the information for that PU.
- Clicking on the Document links, eight via the popup menu or the Documents area (bottom left of screen), will open the SMP policy Statement at the specific page for the selected policy.
To open the SMP Policy Database select “SMP” from the main menu bar, then select SMP Policy Database from the drop-down menu. The SMP Policy Database Editor enables the data for the SMP policy unit to be entered/edited and linked to the respective policy statement document and page no (only if document is a .pdf).
When all of the data and links have been filled it is possible to view a summary of the information by selecting the Policy Unit you are interested in and clicking on the “Open selected SMP Policy Summary” button at the bottom left-hand side of the SMP page. From the page that opens up it will be possible to open the linked documents using the “Policy Unit Statement” and “Action Plan” buttons.
Example of a SMP Policy Statement opened in SANDS:
NOTE: SANDS can open any linked PDF document as a form within SANDS if Adobe Reader v7.0 or later is installed. This option can be turned off by unchecking the ‘Open PDF Documents in SANDS’ button on the Options menu, SANDS will then open any PDFs externally in Adobe Reader or any other PDF viewer software registered on the users system.
The SMP Policy Database is available for download (1.69GB) and contains the database and all associated GIS and SMP Policy Statements; extract the zip to a new folder of your choice alongside your existing SANDS Databases.
You will need to add a new alias to the configuration file which points to the SMP Policy Database. When in SANDS, select the new alias from the Database List in SANDS. Please note that you will need to have SANDS v6.6 Professional or Viewer installed to use the SMP Policy Database.
