The European Marine Board hosted the webinar "Navigating the Future V as inspiration and direction for marine science in the Ocean Decade" on Thursday 19 August, as part of its #ThirdThursdayScience series moderated by Sheila Heymans (who's also a member of the Blue-Cloud External Stakeholders Expert Board).
The virtual talk built on the science presented in EMB's flagship publication Navigating the Future V, featuring a presentation and Q&A session with co-author Michiel Vandegehuchte, who is currently leading and building a new research department at the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) in Oostende, Belgium.
VLIZ is coordinating the development of one of the Blue-Cloud demonstrators, "Zoo & Phytoplankton EOV Products", which was introduced during the webinar as one of the key examples of VLIZ's work on understanding the interactions between long-term biodiversity and ecosystem data in the ocean.
The demonstrator is also well-embedded in the LifeWatch programme, working on the data coming from these observations (and expanding it with data coming from other sources) to put them into a model in the Blue-Cloud Virtual Lab. This helps researchers to determine the main drivers linking to the physical and biogeochemical ocean, resulting in phyto and zooplankton dynamics in the biological ocean over time.
