The Horizon Europe DTO-BioFlow project has launched the Second Open Call offering up to 60,000€ for institutions that manage marine biodiversity data, to invite them to contribute to the European Digital Twin of the Ocean (EU DTO) by making their data available through EMODnet Biology, a portal providing open, free access to interoperable data on the temporal and spatial distribution of marine organisms, including angiosperms, benthos, birds, fish, macroalgae, mammals, reptiles, phyto- and zooplankton from Europe’s regional seas.
The primary goal of these calls is to support the standardization and publication of previously unavailable biodiversity data and the establishment of (semi-)automated workflows, enabling the sustained, long-term ingestion of this data into the EU DTO.
Published on December 18th, 2024, this single-stage call remains open to a wide range of marine biodiversity data holders, including European networks, citizen science organizations, research institutes, universities, and NGOs, until February 28th, 2025, 23:59 CET.
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Tackling the Challenge of "Sleeping Data"
A multitude of entities—including researchers, public bodies, blue economy operators, NGOs, and citizen science groups—collect marine biodiversity data using diverse methods. Despite significant progress in Europe to collect, harmonize, and make available marine biodiversity data, a large portion remains unavailable or inaccessible.
To activate these “sleeping data”, third parties can access a maximum funding amount of 60,000€ to establish a sustained data flow to the EU DTO, by performing activities which include developing data flow pipelines, ensuring the data is formatted, standardized, and quality-controlled conforming to the relevant international standards and ensuring the data complies to Open Access.
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The Second Open Call for Marine Biodiversity Data Projects
This second Open Call builds on the success of the first round, which selected nine diverse projects employing various methods—such as citizen science, AI-assisted imaging, net trawls, and benthic grabs—to collect data on organisms ranging from cetaceans to plankton and benthos. These projects covered regions from the Arctic to the Mediterranean and the Azores. The first round received over 20 applications from countries including the UK, Netherlands, Sweden, Portugal, Norway, Italy, and Israel.
One of the criteria for evaluation is how much proposed projects would contribute to filling (taxonomic/geographic/temporal) data gaps in EMODnet Biology. Regarding the geographic data gaps, the following ICES ecoregions have been identified to be the regions with the most missing data: the Arctic Ocean, Faroes, Greenland Sea, Iceland Sea, Azores, Ionian Sea and the Central Mediterranean Sea, and Aegean-Levantine Sea. As a result, projects containing data from these regions will receive a higher impact score during the selection process.
The evaluation process is scheduled to occur in March 2025. Eligible proposals will be selected based on multiple criteria, including their relevance, potential impact, ability to sustain data flow and automate processes, uniqueness, and overall proposal quality.
The activities for the selected projects will take place over a one-year period, from May 1st, 2025, to April 30th, 2026.
Interested parties can find all details regarding the expected activities, eligibility criteria, assessment and application process of this second open call on the DTO-BioFlow website:Â https://dto-bioflow.eu/second-open-call-marine-biodiversity-data
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Info & more:
For more information on the DTO-BioFlow Open Calls, please visit https://dto-bioflow.eu/open-calls or contact the open calls team at opencalls[at]dto-bioflow.eu.
Applicants should submit their applications through the Open Call webform on the DTO-BioFlow website:Â
https://dto-bioflow.eu/second-open-call-marine-biodiversity-data
For more information about the DTO-BioFlow project, please visit the DTO-BioFlow website at https://dto-bioflow.eu/.Â
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