Blue-Cloud 2026 - D4.4 VLabs Users Handbook V2

By working closely with long-term EU marine data services (i.e., EMODnet, Copernicus), and research data infrastructures (i.e., EuroArgo, SeaDataNet, Ecotaxa and others), the collaborative Blue-Cloud 2026 project is offering to the marine community a state-of-the-art Virtual Research Environment designed to implement an incubator of new research ideas, models and services, supporting scientists and researchers in designing, testing, and evaluating innovative computational analytical flows that extract valuable knowledge from diverse datasets, while accelerating open science and collaborative research in ocean sustainability. The Blue-Cloud Virtual Research Environment (VRE) offers a comprehensive environment for sharing data, tools, and knowledge, fostering innovation and discovery. The Blue-Cloud architecture is the technological foundation of the EOSC Node | Digital Twin of the Ocean, the federated thematic node within the EOSC Federation. The Blue-Cloud VRE adheres to the EOSC Interoperability Framework, supporting standard data formats, common metadata profiles, and controlled vocabularies. It shares common standards and policies aligned with the EOSC Federation Handbook. By integrating advanced analytical tools, robust computing resources, and diverse datasets from observations and models, the platform empowers researchers to tackle complex ocean challenges and enhances the scientific community's ability to understand and predict marine phenomena while fostering the development of cutting-edge technologies and methodologies and ensuring seamless data exchange and integration with other European and international research environments within the EOSC framework. The Blue-Cloud innovation potential is explored and unlocked by dedicated demonstrators as Virtual Labs (VLabs) co-designed with top-level marine researchers to demonstrate the power of the Blue-Cloud Open Science platform. The objective is to deploy a wide range of custom methods and technologies, such as softwares and algorithms, using cloud-based services in the Blue-Cloud VRE. The VLabs bring new data types, such as currents or carbon data, and are also able to incorporate the Data Discovery and Access (DD&AS) Service to their workflows. This deliverable provides guidelines on how to use each of the VLabs developed during the Blue-Cloud 2026 project. Users are encouraged to discover and understand the services and run them as proposed by the developers. The document is structured by sections for each of the VLabs, from VLab one to five. Specifically, the handbook details five Virtual Labs covering coastal observation integration, currents, carbon-plankton dynamics, global fisheries, and a suite of marine environmental indicators (including heatwaves and storm severity). It provides developers and researchers with step-by-step workflows to explore, process, and download FAIR-compliant marine data, utilizing core platform features.