The Digital Atlas of the North Sea (DANS) is a result of the projects MarGIS (Funded by the BMBF/DFG specific research program Geotechnologies) and METROL (Funded within the 5th framework program of the EU) as well as our additional data acquisition and analysis following these projects.

The DANS is considered as a step towards an increasing availability and visibility of environmental data about the North Sea. We focused our data compilation to the seafloor and the bottom water, due to their importance for the bio- and geosciences as well as for economic demands like construction and operation of offshore wind parks, oil- and gas extraction, sand- and gravel mining, or pipeline and cable laying.

For scientific objectives as well as coastal management issues detailed geo-information about offshore coastal environments are required to identify trends, feedback mechanisms and local environmental changes. This implies the availability of geological, geochemical, sediment related or biological data as
well as of thematic maps about distribution patterns of benthic organisms or geological structures in the deep bedrock.

We hope that the Digital Atlas of the North Sea will support scientific objectives and will promote academic education in schools and universities.