The European Commission awarded €16 million to the Horizon Europe projects Blue-Cloud 2026 and AquaINFRA in the broader context of the EU Mission "Restore our Ocean and Waters” by 2030. For the Mission to be successful, connecting data on the marine and coastal environment, on biodiversity, and on the water cycle with the ‘Blue Economy’ is essential. This is why these two projects have been funded as part of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) initiative, that aims to enable Open Science practices in Europe.
Blue-Cloud 2026 and AquaINFRA will indeed promote Open Science practices as well as implement FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data commons and collaborative data services. The objective is to accelerate the sharing and reuse of publicly funded research findings and data amongst the multiple contributors to the Mission, from scientists to public authorities, citizens and industry.
Both projects will demonstrate the interplay between the EOSC data space and the Green Deal data space and act as EOSC blueprints for ‘blue research’. They will involve several research communities and data infrastructures in multi-disciplinary use cases demonstrating the value of the EOSC and contributing to the science base enabling the Mission’s ‘Digital Ocean and Waters Knowledge System’, and it’s ‘Digital Twin’ of the Ocean in particular.
Both projects have different, but complementary, foci that will support the uptake and continued development of EOSC as a federated European infrastructure. The tools and services developed by the two projects will be made available to other researchers through the EOSC Portal and other relevant platforms such as EMODnet. Both projects will kick off mid-February 2023 and will be running until 2026.
The Blue-Cloud 2026 kick-off meeting takes place in Pisa, Italy, on 13-15 February 2023.
The AquaINFRA kick-off conference takes place in Copenhagen, Denmark, on 14-16 February 2023.
Full article: European Commission
