Within the context of the ODMS, an area is defined as a fixed monitoring station, a monitoring transect, or a polygon having a certain significance. These polygons may be NAFO fishing zones or "Petrie Boxes," which were designated for the study of physical properties of water masses in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. For the moment, the only areas included in the system are the stations and transects of the monitoring programs. We plan to add the aforementioned polygons in the future. A data set can belong to several areas at the same time; for example, a monitoring station can be part of a monitoring transect. Therefore, a data set would be linked to both the station and the transect. This concept was implanted to avoid difficulties finding data collected at the fixed stations. A fixed station is theoretically identified by its position; however, it is nearly impossible to always return to exactly the same position with great precision. To retrieve these data, one would have to define a "reasonably" small rectangle that is centered on the station. We can avoid this difficulty by searching for an area using the sampling area concept.

The page Area contains a table with information on all the stations present in the system. The table is made up of four columns. The first contains the acronym for the area--the acronym was chosen so that is would be easy to remember. The second column has the complete name of the area, the third identifies the area type (i.e., STATION, TRANSECT, POLYGON), and the forth has a full description of the area.

To select an area, scroll through the table until you have found the area that is of interest to you and then click the line. To select more than one zone, hold down the Ctrl (several single selections) or Shift (several contiguous selections) key as you click the left mouse button.

Attention: When you search for data using the Area page, you should not fill out the spatial reference page. The two together may exclude data that you are looking for.