Webinar: Test the Virtual Labs - Zoo & Phytoplankton EOV Products

After our successful Hackathon, which welcomed more than 30 teams from all around the world, we are launching a new webinar series to invite the entire marine research community to test the Blue-Cloud Virtual Labs.

The Zoo & Phytoplankton EOV Products Virtual Lab is developed by the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ), in collaboration with the Faculty of Science and Engineering at Sorbonne University and GeoHydrodynamics and Environment Research (GHER) at the University of Liège.

This Virtual Lab provides a description of the current state of the plankton communities and forecasts their evolution, representing valuable information for the modelling, assessment and management of the marine ecosystem. 

Test the Virtual Lab

Services developed

• Zooplankton EOV: A complete workflow using the DIVAnd software tool (Data Interpolating Variational Analysis in n dimensions) to create interpolated maps of zooplankton abundances. The service is provided as a set of Jupyter notebooks that describe the full procedure to create the final, gridded products. The main dataset for this service is the abundance data, consisting of a set of positions (longitude, latitude) and the bathymetry and distance to nearest coastline datasets used for the interpolation.
• Phytoplankton EOV: A service implementing a methodology to produce phytoplankton EOV products, i.e. global 3D products, by using machine learning-based methods. An artificial neural network (Multi-Layer Perceptrons, MLPs) is trained to produce a vertical distribution of Chla concentrations.
• Scientific validation: A workflow to run a mechanistic model analysis, using near-real-time data to quantify the relative contributions of the bottom-up and top-down drivers in phytoplankton dynamics. The Nutrient, Phytoplankton, Zooplankton and Detritus (NPZD) model used in this demonstrator has been created by Soetaert and Herman (2009). The workflow is provided in R markdown documents and uses parallel computing on the VRE.

Who should attend

• Marine researchers
• Fisheries advisory organisations
• Marine policy officers
• Biodiversity enthusiasts

Agenda (all times CET)

• 11:30 Blue-Cloud project introduction - Sara Pittonet Gaiarin, Trust-IT Services, Blue-Cloud Project Coordinator
• 11:35 Demo and VLab Introduction - Patricia Cabrera, Flanders Marine Institute, VLIZ. Belgium
• 11:45 Phytoplankton EOV - Julia Uitz, Laboratoire d'Océanographie de Villefranche, LOV - Institut de la Mer de Villefranche, IMEV. France
• 11:55 Zooplankton EOV - Charles Troupin, University of Liège-GHER, Belgium
• 12:05 Modellling phyto-zooplankton interactions - Steven Pint, Flanders Marine Institute, VLIZ. Belgium
• 12:15 Q&A

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