The purpose of the African Marine Atlas (AMA) is to identify, collect and organize available geospatial datasets into an atlas of environmental themes for Africa, under the sponsorship of the ODINAFRICA Project of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission’s (IOC) International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange (IODE) Programme. The African Marine Atlas will include and involve a number of other geo-spatial data projects on and around the African continent. At the present time, the majority of the data layers in the African Marine Atlas are continental-scale, but the structure of this interface already allows for the inclusions of national- and local-scale layers. All the African Marine Atlas datasets, images and grids use the standard GIS mapping convention of signed decimal degrees, with longitudes ranging from -180 to +180 (i.e. not 0 to 360). No data are projected, and as far as can be determined all data products are provided in “geographic coordinates” using the WGS84 Datum, in absence of other information. Seasonal references in the datasets refer to the northern (boreal) seasons (i.e. winter ranges from January to March), unless otherwise stated.
