Transforming underwater survey data into interactive insight
Tritonia Scientific, working with Marine Scotland through the Scottish Governments CivTech programme, needed a new way to manage and share the results of advanced underwater surveys.
The existing approach relied on fragmented datasets and static reports, which made collaboration between marine scientists, government bodies and other stakeholders difficult.
The challenge was to create a secure, scalable tool capable of handling large, complex marine data, including 3D survey imagery, and transforming it into a format that was intuitive for researchers, policymakers and non-technical stakeholders to explore and use in decision-making.
Hydrophis was designed as a multi-agency collaboration tool, enabling marine scientists, regulators and industry stakeholders to access, interrogate, and share underwater survey data in a meaningful way.
This was the subject of CivTech 8.4 “Protecting and enhancing marine natural capital” which addressed the issue of mapping, visualising and monitoring the subsea environment to manage the impact of marine aquaculture and offshore energy infrastructure.
By combining GIS and 3D visualisation technologies with robust metadata tagging and API-driven data pipelines, we helped the Tritonia team to create a system that allowed users to view complex marine environments intuitively.
Hosted in AWS, the system delivered security and scalability for the extremely large datasets. The platform has strengthened collaboration across agencies, supported evidence-based marine policy and showcased the power of digital innovation in environmental science.
The Hydrophis tool has transformed how marine survey data is managed, shared, and used across Scotland. It provides researchers and policymakers with immersive, interactive access to data that was previously siloed or inaccessible.
Its success has been recognised as a pioneering example of digital transformation in the environmental sector, demonstrating how cutting-edge visualisation and cloud technologies can deliver measurable impact in science and policy.
Hydrophis has laid the groundwork for future innovation, proving the value of collaborative, user-centred digital tools in protecting and managing marine ecosystems.
