Kraken the code - Hackathon 2025

Octopus population booms in the southwest UK occur roughly every 50–75 years. These events devastate crab stocks and, despite the potential value of octopus catches, offer few benefits due to a lack of infrastructure and policies in place to capitalize on their sudden abundance.

OctoPulse proposes a collaborative methodology that brings together fishers, scientists, policymakers, and other stakeholders to work together to better understand and predict these events. The platform will enable users to explore historical records and use the information to develop and test hypotheses through integrated modelling tools.

Through a collective intelligence approach, community-generated hypotheses will inform a dynamic early warning system, using the latest multi-community understanding to help coastal communities prepare for and adapt to future booms. OctoPulse supports early warning and response to natural marine events (Challenge 2) by enabling proactive, community-informed forecasting of octopus booms. It empowers stakeholders to collaborate and anticipate future events to reduce disruption and enhance resilience in coastal communities.

Blue-Cloud resources used by this design include:

  • VLab 2: Coastal currents.
  • VLab 4 – Marine environmental indicators.
  • Jupyter notebooks
  • Data discovery and access service
  • Data discovery and access service
  • WebODV
  • EDITO-DataLab (Future Extension Plan)

External data sources will be used to enhance temporal and spatial coverage, with particular focus on Western Channel Observatory data via EMODNet and Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS) data for oceanographic and climate data. Historical fisheries data will also be searched and incorporated where available.

 

Kraken The Code