Learn how to access and analyze marine biological and environmental data from EMODnet using R. These hands-on tutorials guide you through real-world marine spatial analysis workflows, from accessing data via web services to creating publication-ready visualizations.
Whether you’re investigating marine protected areas, exploring species distributions, or analyzing biodiversity change, these tutorials provide reproducible code and practical examples you can adapt to your own research questions.
TipNew to geospatial analysis?
If you’re unfamiliar with spatial data concepts, coordinate systems, or the difference between vector and raster data, start with our Geospatial Concepts page.
What You’ll Learn
These tutorials demonstrate how to:
Access marine data programmatically using EMODnet’s web services (WFS and WCS)
Work with vector data representing species occurrences, habitat boundaries, and human activities
Analyze raster data including bathymetry, species distributions, and environmental variables
Integrate multiple data sources from EMODnet, Copernicus Marine Service, and trait databases
Apply spatial operations such as intersection, masking, and point extraction
Visualize spatial patterns relevant to marine conservation and management
By the end of these tutorials, you’ll be able to independently access, analyze, and visualize EMODnet data for your own marine research questions.
Tutorial Series
1 Protected Areas and Subsea Infrastructure
Identifying Protected Areas Affected by Subsea Infrastructure in the North Sea
Learn the fundamentals of accessing EMODnet WFS data by identifying marine protected areas that overlap with subsea infrastructure like pipelines and cables. This tutorial introduces spatial intersection operations and provides a foundation for marine spatial planning analyses.
You’ll work with: Marine protected area boundaries, pipeline locations, subsea cable networks, platform locations
2 Zooplankton and Plaice Nursery Grounds
Exploring the Overlap Between Zooplankton Distributions and Predicted Plaice Nursery Grounds
Discover how to access and analyze gridded environmental data using EMODnet WCS services. Explore the spatial relationship between zooplankton abundance and fish nursery habitats in the Eastern English Channel using raster analysis techniques.
You’ll work with: Copepod abundance grids, fish habitat suitability models, multi-band raster data
3 Biodiversity Change and Depth
Relating Marine Biodiversity Change to Depth in the North Sea
Combine vector and raster data to investigate environmental drivers of biodiversity change. Extract bathymetric values at biodiversity sampling points and explore relationships between depth and species turnover across the North Sea.
Integrate EMODnet data with external trait databases and Copernicus Marine Service environmental data. Investigate how benthic species body size varies across habitat types and environmental gradients in the Aegean Sea.
You’ll work with: Benthic species occurrences, seabed habitat maps, trait databases, temperature reanalysis data
Who These Tutorials Are For
These tutorials are designed for:
Marine researchers working with spatial data on species distributions, habitats, or human activities
Data scientists interested in applying geospatial methods to marine applications
Graduate students learning marine ecology, spatial analysis, or data science
Policy analysts requiring evidence-based spatial information for marine management
Prerequisites
To get the most from these tutorials, you should have:
R Programming:
Basic to intermediate R skills (working with data frames, installing packages, running functions)
Familiarity with the tidyverse is helpful but not required
Experience with RStudio or similar R development environment
Geospatial Background:
Understanding of basic spatial concepts (coordinates, projections, spatial data types)
Awareness of vector vs. raster data
Familiarity with common spatial operations
Note
If you’re new to geospatial analysis, visit our Geospatial Concepts page for an introduction to key concepts before starting the tutorials.
Getting Started
Installation
Install the required packages using the following code:
# Install EMODnet data access packagespak::pak(c("emodnet/emodnet.wfs", "emodnet/emodnet.wcs"))# Install spatial data packagespak::pak(c("sf", "terra"))# Install data manipulation and visualization packagespak::pak(c("dplyr", "ggplot2"))
