Establishing long-term collaborations in marine research and open science

5 September 2022

September 2022

Collaboration, cooperation and shared visions are the foundations of every successful synergy. Creating open science platforms to facilitate the use and reuse of oceanic data is a team work activity, and cannot be achieved by one project alone. Blue-Cloud poses special attention to this aspect for creating valuable cooperation among projects operating in the Blue Economy and Marine Research and over the course of the last three years has established strong synergies with initiatives in this area to foster the adoption of its innovative open-science solutions.

Between October 2021 to April 2022, Blue-Cloud has signed 4 Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) establishing durable cooperation with the H2020 projects AQUA-LIT, EuroSea, Jonas and JERICO, key initiatives in coastal monitoring, noise prevention, aquaculture and ocean forecasting systems


aqua-lit.eu	eurosea.eu	jonasproject.eu	jerico-ri.eu

Their joint efforts are focused on:

Usage and exploitation of Blue-Cloud VRE services

Uptake and new ways of usage of Blue-Cloud services has been assessed in the collaboration frameworks. In the case of JERICO, the pan-European multidisciplinary and multi-platform research infrastructure dedicated to a holistic appraisal of coastal marine system changes, a dedicated Virtual Research Environment (VRE) was created on the Blue-Cloud open science platform to allow their team to explore a possible technical integration of the data and products offered by the JERICO-Research Infrastructure into Blue-Cloud, with mutual benefits in terms of users, customisation of the products and access to data.

The creation of a VRE might also serve the needs of the JONAS project, addressing the risks of these acoustic pressures on marine biodiversity by improving ocean noise monitoring and risk prediction, and of the EuroSea initiative to improve forecasting systems. Discussions are ongoing to check whether setting up a Virtual Research Environment can be useful, in the meantime Blue-Cloud, JONAS and EuroSea are gaining mutual access to the data of their VRE. By collaborating with Blue-Cloud, EuroSea can improve the European ocean observing and forecasting system in a global context, getting access to a wider range of oceanic FAIR data, and Jonas can perform better analysis to improve ocean noise monitoring and highlight the risks of acoustic pressures on marine biodiversity by accessing the Blue-Cloud data in addition to the ones collected by Jonas.

Connecting Data to key European Data Management service providers via Blue-Cloud

AQUA-LIT works to provide a sustainable toolbox of innovative ideas and methodologies that prevent marine littering from aquaculture activities entering the ocean. Its data sources can be integrated in the Blue-Cloud dataset through the EMODnet Chemistry infrastructure, helping increase, in this way, the quality of marine litter data. At the same time AQUA-LIT can get access to an increased amount of information that helps the team understand how aquaculture activities are littering the ocean through monitoring and quantification frameworks.

Contributing to shaping the Blue-Cloud Roadmap

The four projects all provided insights and recommendations to Blue-Cloud for shaping its about the development of the project’s strategic Roadmap to 2030. Their suggestions were taken into account in positioning the Blue-Cloud open science platform and its services into the EU marine knowledge value chain.

Joint dissemination and communication activities

Last but not least, AQUA-LIT, EuroSea, Jonas, JERICO and Blue-Cloud support each other in dissemination and communication activities to share the projects’ results and reach a broader community.

These joint efforts are strategic to help Blue-Cloud increase and improve its service offer, namely the aquaculture data quality of the Blue-Cloud Virtual Labs Aquaculture Monitor and Marine Environmental Indicators. They also support the development of a long-term sustainable action plan in the aquaculture, ocean noise monitoring, marine coastal science and ocean observing and forecasting systems fields.

Learn more about the synergies established by Blue-Cloud