Open science ecosystem for the blue economy further expands in Europe
Recently, Europe has become a leader in marine ecosystems research, with infrastructures, programmes and major R&D projects that have increased its capacity for aquatic environmental observation, modelling, forecasting, data-handling and sharing. Open science programmes are an integral part of this capability, contributing significantly to the advancement of marine preservation. In 2019, the EU-funded Blue-Cloud project started, with the aim of developing a virtual pilot platform that provides open and seamless access to multidisciplinary data and research tools for ocean sustainability. After a successful 4-year process, Blue-Cloud 2026 kicked off in 2023 with a more ambitious goal: to evolve the pilot platform into a federated European ecosystem to deliver FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) and open data and analytical services to deepen the research of oceans, seas and coastal and inland waters. With a team of 40 partners from 13 countries, this project is essential in developing a marine extension to the European Open Science Cloud, supporting fundamental strategies of the European Union, such as the Green Deal, the Destination Earth initiative and the ‘Restore our Ocean and Waters’ mission.
The current Blue-Cloud platform
With oceans covering 70 % of the Earth’s surface and representing over 95 % of the planet’s biosphere, it is easy to see how complex the data for marine preservation can be, requiring an approach that involves various disciplines. The Blue-Cloud ecosystem currently enables users to search and access more than 10 million data sets. It also federates leading European data marine infrastructures, which collect in situ and remote data related to marine biodiversity, surface ocean CO2 observations, ocean physics, biogenomics and bathymetry among many other fields. The project’s virtual research environment is already one of the most mature communities in open science in the cloud. Users can not only discover and access data, but store and publish their work, execute analysis and processes and interact with fellow researchers through social networking functionalities.
Next developments
Over the course of 42 months, Blue-Cloud 2026 will improve and integrate more services in the platform. The data discovery and access services will be expanded, more blue data infrastructures will be federated and data lakes for storing and maintaining raw data from the infrastructures will be deployed. Next steps will focus on developing, testing and documenting new workbenches that will result in highly qualified data sets of Essential Ocean Variables (EOVs). EOVs are divided into physics, linked to temperature and salinity; chemistry, related to nutrients, chlorophyll and oxygen; and ecosystem, concerning plankton biomass and diversity. The challenge ahead is to deal with large in-situ data sets. The consortium will face this by leveraging its high-level performance environment based on cloud computing, associated with big data, data lakes and data management. The resulting workbenches will be fundamental to position Blue-Cloud 2026 as an important collaborator of the European Digital Twin of the Ocean. Together with other research projects, like the EDITO-infra, Blue-Cloud will support this interactive replica of the ocean to provide knowledge for better decision making. The project’s EOV collections will be used for analysing the state of the environment, as well as forecasting its evolution and testing possible impacts of sustainability measures.
Keywords
Blue-Cloud 2026, oceans, open science, sustainability, marine preservation, blue economy, big data