The Blue-Cloud demonstrator on fisheries is a good opportunity to get to know our five demonstrators better. It already uses Virtual Research Environments (VREs), and many services can already be used and tested. The demonstrator "Fish, a matter of scales" uses the Blue-Cloud infrastructure to deliver services for and with the Fisheries Division of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, the French National Research Institute and the Institute of Computer Science at FORTH.
This demonstrator builds upon years of experience in developing data services for fisheries, matured especially during the previous iMarine and BlueBRIDGE initiatives.
These are the main goals on the horizon for this Blue-Cloud demonstrator:
- Improve the FAO Tuna Atlas VRE and build on this experience to develop the Fisheries Atlas as a vertically integrated toolset for managing the entire life cycle of public statistical data on fisheries, from ingestion, through harmonisation, to publication.
- Expand the Global Record of Stocks and Fisheries (GRSF) with more status assessments of stocks and fisheries, include data from the Fisheries Atlas and from other EOSC domains such as the recently funded FNS-Cloud project.
The current landscape
The Global Tuna Atlas is based on an OGC-compliant Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) based on Postgres and Geonetwork that is integrated in the Blue-Cloud infrastructure. It has extensive support for data processing with R and WPS, and data visualization through an independent OpenFairViewer map-viewer and RShiny Applications.
The Global Record of Stocks and Fisheries (GRSF) instead is a complete framework that ingests records from the three main global databases of Stocks and Fisheries records (FIRMS - Fisheries and Resources Monitoring System, RAM Legacy Stock Assessment Database and FishSource of the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership) and provides tools to merge and reconcile records. It includes a semantic Knowledge Base (KB) on Stocks and Fisheries information. Its content is also discoverable in the GRSF data catalogue. The GRSF map Viewer re-uses Open Source Software components such as the metadata-driven OpenFairViewer.
The Blue-Cloud added-value
The Blue-Cloud demonstrator will be a template for other organisations that need to manage large amounts of tabular data, analyse these with R or other softwares, and use a metadata-driven approach to maps. It will show how datasets from a wide variety of sources, including other Blue-Cloud demonstrators, can be managed and presented through a single infrastructure. It aspires to develop a data workflow that is compliant with the FAIR principles of Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability.
As the Blue-Cloud comes together, it will be possible to ingest and merge fisheries data with data from other Blue-Cloud resources, for example to cross-analyse invasive species modelling and species habitat shifts, demonstrating that we can combine fisheries, food and environmental data in a single infrastructure. The data and results of the fisheries VRE will become part of the GRSF. This will underline the key benefits of a standardised and harmonised approach to describe fisheries for trade and traceability, food safety and food security, nature and environmental conservation.
In the Tuna Atlas, Blue-Cloud aims to demonstrate the capability of EU infrastructures to enable cross-domain analysis, bringing together data from EMODnet, Copernicus, and UN Organisations in order to analyse the dynamic relations between fisheries and the environment. The team will work through the iMarine partnership with data management partners, to make sure that the opportunities of Blue-Cloud are visible and understood by a wide range of stakeholders.
This demonstrator will provide precious insights on data management for global fisheries issues, and is designed to support capacity building, proving how the Blue-Cloud framework can be used to train and support local practitioners.
It will also offer data services in support of Sustainable Development Goals, in particular, the following three:
- 2 - End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture (especially in collaboration with the Food Cloud project)
- 13 - Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts
- 14 - Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development
Hear directly from Anton Ellenbroek, Consultant on Fisheries information systems development at FAO.
Register for the upcoming webinar on "Fish, a matter of scales", scheduled on 14 October 2020.
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