Essential Ocean Variables (EOV) and Essential Biodiversity variables (EBV) are critical for the analysis of the state of the environment and for numerical simulations, which can now be exposed to wider audiences and be used to accelerate Ocean knowledge and deepen our understanding of the trade-offs of human activities in the marine environment thanks to the potential brought by ongoing efforts to co-construct the European Digital Twin Ocean (DTO). However, current data collections are based on a large number of data packages of different types and sources, computationally intensive and processed by different experts using different methods, resulting in no interoperable data collections.
To overcome these limitations, Blue-Cloud 2026 project is developing three data-intensive Workbenches (WB) for physical (Temperature, Salinity), eutrophication (Nutrients, Chlorophyll, Oxygen) and ecosystem-level (Plankton biomass, diversity) variables. Leveraging on the Blue-Cloud collaborative web-based environment, enhanced discovery and access services and relevant cloud-computing resources, these Workbenches integrate the latest data collections from major European and global Blue Data Infrastructures to create consistent, harmonized, highly-qualified EOV & EBV datasets through cloud-based analytical pipelines.
The resulting EOV & EBV datasets and workflows allows users to rapidly generate accurate, value-added data products for ocean monitoring, modeling and simulation scenarios, improving research and decision-making in areas such as climate change adaptation, sustainable blue economy and marine habitat restoration.
As part of the activities under WP7 "Exploitation, Strategic Roadmap to 2030 and Sustainability" and Task 7.2 "Developing an exploitation plan for Blue-Cloud's assets", the deliverable presents individual exploitation plans for each WB, detailing their scope, outputs, target users, asset ownership, exploitation pathways and key exploitation channels, key performance indicators (KPIs), and required resources to ensure the operational uptake, long-term impact and accessibility of the Workbenches' results.
This deliverable also aligns with the strategic vision of the Blue-Cloud Roadmap to 2030, and provides the Workbenches first contributions to the project's Exploitation and Sustainability plan (D7.3 and D7.5), thus contributing to the long-term uptake and accessibility of the project's results to foster advanced and open marine science.
The key findings can be summarized as follow:
Accessibility and reusability of the results beyond the project's end is facilitated through the deployment of the Workbenches in the Blue-Cloud VRE & catalogue, which benefits from the alignment activities of Blue-Cloud2026 with European initiatives such as EOSC, EDITO, EMODnet and CMEMS to reach the Workbenches primary users (scientists, data modelers) but also intermediary & end-users (policymakers, blue economy stakeholders, citizens).
The Workbenches operational uptake and long-term impact are secured through the active involvement of Blue Data Infrastructures and European Data Aggregators experts in the Workbench design, and through the multiple synergies and collaborations being developed with other European research projects. Dissemination activities, scientific publications & targeted training will help expand the user base and foster easy adoption in the research and education sectors.
Finally, the deliverable also emphasizes the necessity of sustained engagement of the different stakeholders beyond the project's conclusion, to continue tailoring data products requirements to the emerging societal needs, and optimizing data workflows to meet evolving demands, thus achieving a lasting impact.