Five Blue-Cloud demonstrators are developed under the supervision of the French Research Institute for Exploitation of the Sea (
The demonstrator “Plankton Genomics” is led by the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), in collaboration with the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) and the Faculty of Sciences at Sorbonne University.
It will focus on plankton involving genomics analysis in its methodology. It will showcase a deep assessment of plankton distributions, dynamics and fine-grained diversity to molecular resolution, focusing on two areas:
- Species and functions discovery: discovery of as yet undescribed biodiversity from genetic and morphological signals from the characterisation of their geographical distributions, co-occurrences/exclusions and correlation with environmental contexts.
- Biodiversity and ecology: exploration of genetic and morphological markers of plankton diversity and abundance, in particular the new ones discovered above, to predict their spatiotemporal distribution and serve as high-resolution EOVs for biological processes.
Two Notebooks will be constructed that make available and usable the intersect between biomolecular, microscopy image and environmental data types, leveraging workflows around functional genetic inference and image feature classification, made possible through the Blue Cloud infrastructure.
This demonstrator will enable scientific exploration of plankton, including correlating plankton concentration and diversity with local environmental variables, deriving known and new indices of ecosystem health, and predicting the distribution of these variables in space and time.
A monitor of aquaculture can become an important information source for local and national governments that lack capacity to implement a national monitoring tool. It can thus provide a monitor for several Sustainable Development Goals such as 14 "Life below water", and 2 "Food Security".