The Coastal & Marine Wiki was developed within the scope of the European project 'European Network for Coastal Research' or ENCORA, and with over 10,000 unique visitors a month it was one of the top websites of 2008. The encyclopaedia is organised according to the following six themes:
- Natural environment: articles that refer to a certain coastal or marine ecosystem (seagrass meadows, estuaries, sand dunes), to processes (hydrodynamic, ecological, biogeomorphological, etc) or to resources (minerals, marine organisms, water, etc.).
- Human activities: articles to help you understand which human activities or uses have caused or are affected by certain coastal issues or impacts. Subcategories include from coastal urban development, aquaculture or maritime transportation to coastal defence or heritage management.
- Issues and impacts: the main issues of concern to coastal management. Some of the issues or impacts may be environmental but they could also be economic or social.
- Areas and locations: articles are classified either because of the main land use (rural, urban, protected, etc.) of the coastal or marine area that the article is referring to, or because of its location/s in the world. The United Nations Regional Sea categorisation has been used to indicate coastal and marine locations.
- Coastal management: articles where the different aspects of coastal management are explained or put into practice. Information, capacity building, participation, policy making, evaluation, regulations, etc. are some of these aspects. One of the most popular categories is “techniques and methods in coastal management”. There is also the possibility of browsing through the various “typologies of coastal management”.
- People and organisations: articles in which the key actors may be coastal communities of users, NGOs or international institutions.
The 'Coastal & Marine WIKI' is used in various training courses on coastal management in Europe. Within the Coastal & Marine WIKI a portal on marine biodiversity has also been developed in consultation with the MarBEF network (Marine Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning): www.encora.eu/coastalwiki/Portal:Marine_Biodiversity. VLIZ will host and maintain this online encyclopaedia, also after the ENCORA-project, while several European experts engaged themselves to keep writing and complete articles.