Periodic Reporting for period 2 - BlueBRIDGE (Building Research environments for fostering Innovation, Decision making, Governance and Education to support Blue growth)
Reporting period: 2016-12-01 to 2018-02-28
BlueBRIDGE’s overall objective is to support capacity building in interdisciplinary research communities actively involved in increasing scientific knowledge about resource overexploitation, degraded environment and ecosystem with the aim of providing a more solid ground for informed advice to competent authorities and to enlarge the spectrum of growth opportunities as addressed by the Blue Growth Societal Challenge. To meet this objective, BlueBRIDGE has targeted the implementation of a set of Virtual Research Environments (VREs) in areas related to Stock Assessment, Socio-economical aspects in Aquaculture, Marine Environment and Education. These VREs were aimed to facilitate communities of scientists, innovators from SMEs and educators operating in different domains (e.g. fisheries, biology, economics, statistics, environment, mathematics, social sciences, natural sciences, computer science) in their knowledge production chain, from the initial phases, data collection and aggregation, to the production of indicators for competent authorities and investors. These communities span from EU and International world-renowned leading institutions (e.g. ICES, IRD, FAO, UNEP), providing informed advice on sustainable use of marine resources to member countries, international organizations and relevant Commissions, as well as national academic institutions and SMEs.
BlueBRIDGE has fully achieved its objectives by providing 66 operational VREs, serving 3000+ users. These VREs span 120+ different organizations across 32 countries, application domains and purposes. In many cases, their potential impact in the areas addressed is huge. The implementation and deployment of these VREs has required the empowering of the D4Science infrastructure both in terms of functionality and capacity. In particular, during the project the infrastructure was enriched with powerful services for the management of federated resources (e.g. Information System, Accounting and Authorization, Data Transfer). It was also equipped with flexible solutions for the integration of external computing (e.g. EGI, GARR) and data (e.g. Copernicus CMEMS, OpenAIRE) infrastructures implementing standards solutions when possible. These facilities are used by VRE implementations for processing data through a large, yet extensible, set of approaches including statistical, data mining, quantitative analysis, and machine learning methods. Algorithms from multiple languages (R Scripts, Java, Python, C/C++ and KNIME workflow Projects) can be imported, easily modified and executed either as a private process or as a collaborative process by sharing it with selected VREs colleagues. Provenance is automatically generated by the data analytics framework seamlessly and transparently enabling re-use, re-purpose, repeatability and sharing of any algorithm execution. A comprehensive BlueBRIDGE resource catalogue (https://bluebridge.d4science.org/catalogue) providing access to Datasets, Research Objects, Services, and Virtual Research Environments, has also been developed and it is now fully operational.
The complete list of VREs developed and operated in the project is available through the BlueBRIDGE Catalogue (https://bluebridge.d4science.org/catalogue). These comprise (i) VREs facilitating stock assessment processes and activities dedicated to manage and publish the results of these processes; (ii) VREs offering aquafarming assessment tools to evaluate and optimize aquafarms performance in terms of a number of Key Performance Indicators and to perform benchmarking analysis against best practices as well as a techno-economic investment analysis; (iii) VREs supporting spatial planning, both for marine protected areas and for aquaculture sites analysis and management; and (iv) VREs supporting education by providing infrastructures enabled environments for hands-on training.
The BlueBRIDGE project has also built a consolidated community of over 2700 relevant contacts. At the end of March 2018 Twitter counts 790 followers, LinkedIn over 1466 connections, Facebook 206 Likes, YouTube over 3000 views and SlideShare over 18000 views. It has organised 8 main workshops during its project lifetime, engaging with over 250 managers, policy-makers and scientists from the fisheries, biodiversity and e-infrastructures domains globally.
BlueBRIDGE made an important step in engaging private companies by becoming the first H2020 project to run an open call for SMEs in an effort to reduce the gaps between private companies and data e-infrastructures. This initiative has succeeded in building a bridge between the Blue Growth sector and Data e-infrastructures. With a total amount of around 400 content pieces produced during the project lifetime, the BlueBRIDGE website (www.bluebridge-vres.eu) has become the reference point for data practitioners in the Blue Growth area willing to approach the e-infrastructure world.
The complete list of VREs developed and operated in the project is available through the BlueBRIDGE Catalogue (https://bluebridge.d4science.org/catalogue). These comprise (i) VREs facilitating stock assessment processes and activities dedicated to manage and publish the results of these processes; (ii) VREs offering aquafarming assessment tools to evaluate and optimize aquafarms performance in terms of a number of Key Performance Indicators and to perform benchmarking analysis against best practices as well as a techno-economic investment analysis; (iii) VREs supporting spatial planning, both for marine protected areas and for aquaculture sites analysis and management; and (iv) VREs supporting education by providing infrastructures enabled environments for hands-on training.
The BlueBRIDGE project has also built a consolidated community of over 2700 relevant contacts. At the end of March 2018 Twitter counts 790 followers, LinkedIn over 1466 connections, Facebook 206 Likes, YouTube over 3000 views and SlideShare over 18000 views. It has organised 8 main workshops during its project lifetime, engaging with over 250 managers, policy-makers and scientists from the fisheries, biodiversity and e-infrastructures domains globally.
BlueBRIDGE made an important step in engaging private companies by becoming the first H2020 project to run an open call for SMEs in an effort to reduce the gaps between private companies and data e-infrastructures. This initiative has succeeded in building a bridge between the Blue Growth sector and Data e-infrastructures. With a total amount of around 400 content pieces produced during the project lifetime, the BlueBRIDGE website (www.bluebridge-vres.eu) has become the reference point for data practitioners in the Blue Growth area willing to approach the e-infrastructure world.
Several innovative VREs have been released by the project that improve the usability, resilience and cost effectiveness of cloud based solutions for scientists, while meeting relevant societal needs. Some example of these VREs are:
(i) The Global Record of Stock and Fisheries VRE aims to serve the needs of Regional Fishery Bodies and their member states, seafood industry (from suppliers to retailers), national agencies of governments dealing with stocks and fisheries reporting, researchers working on global analyses of the state of fishery resources, NGOs promoting sustainable fisheries, and the general public.
(ii) The multiple VREs made available for supporting Stock assessment assist statistical working groups, such as from ICCAT, IOTC, and WECAFC (NOAA), by proving computational capacity, support to standards, enhanced interoperability and (re)usabilty of structured datasets and the generation of dynamic working group documents and replicable reports. All these instruments can largely facilitate the reporting on the UN Sustainable Development Goal indicator 14.4.1.
(iii) The Protected Area Impact Maps (PAIM) VRE has already seen uptake by several countries to support their conservation efforts under the Convention on Biological Diversity Aichi Target 11.
(iv) The Aquaculture Atlas Production System (AAPS), supporting the detection of aquaculture features from EO data, has been demonstrated on Greece, Malta and Indonesia. The same approach will soon be applied in Bangladesh under a collaboration programme with FAO.
(v) 10 VREs have been experimented by many Aquaculture SMEs and 20+ policy makers and stakeholders from the Aquaculture, Environment and Research sector. These VREs provided a set of aquafarming assessment tools to evaluate and optimize SMEs performance in terms of a number of production Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and to perform techno-economic investment analysis.
(vi) 29 VREs have been exploited during 46 courses and events to training of 1100+ undergraduate, postgraduate students, professors and researchers on how to exploit the new capacity and tools that e-infrastructures can offer.
(i) The Global Record of Stock and Fisheries VRE aims to serve the needs of Regional Fishery Bodies and their member states, seafood industry (from suppliers to retailers), national agencies of governments dealing with stocks and fisheries reporting, researchers working on global analyses of the state of fishery resources, NGOs promoting sustainable fisheries, and the general public.
(ii) The multiple VREs made available for supporting Stock assessment assist statistical working groups, such as from ICCAT, IOTC, and WECAFC (NOAA), by proving computational capacity, support to standards, enhanced interoperability and (re)usabilty of structured datasets and the generation of dynamic working group documents and replicable reports. All these instruments can largely facilitate the reporting on the UN Sustainable Development Goal indicator 14.4.1.
(iii) The Protected Area Impact Maps (PAIM) VRE has already seen uptake by several countries to support their conservation efforts under the Convention on Biological Diversity Aichi Target 11.
(iv) The Aquaculture Atlas Production System (AAPS), supporting the detection of aquaculture features from EO data, has been demonstrated on Greece, Malta and Indonesia. The same approach will soon be applied in Bangladesh under a collaboration programme with FAO.
(v) 10 VREs have been experimented by many Aquaculture SMEs and 20+ policy makers and stakeholders from the Aquaculture, Environment and Research sector. These VREs provided a set of aquafarming assessment tools to evaluate and optimize SMEs performance in terms of a number of production Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and to perform techno-economic investment analysis.
(vi) 29 VREs have been exploited during 46 courses and events to training of 1100+ undergraduate, postgraduate students, professors and researchers on how to exploit the new capacity and tools that e-infrastructures can offer.