Optimizing the use of open and sub-meter (VHR) resolution satellite data to generate an aquaculture atlas

Aquaculture, and in particular marine aquaculture, is expected to grow significantly over the following decades (source FAO, OECD). This growth should be sustainable and the impact of aquaculture on the environment should then be carefully monitored.  A prerequisite for this monitoring is the identification and location of aquaculture sites, particularly in coastal areas where conflict of spatial usage is frequent. BlueBRIDGE has implemented a tool to generate an Aquaculture Atlas and has tested it in three countries: Greece, Malta and Indonesia 

Reporting on ecological seafloor features in marine protected area networks

Maritime spatial planning is a rapidly devloping area of marine management. The desire to develop the blue economy sector is one of the main drivers of this trend. Coupled with this development of this sector is the need for sustainability - with the protection of the marine environment, on which many of the blue economy sectors rely, of critical importance. Countries have committed to the protection of the marine environment with respect to number of issues. 

Scientific Data modelling and aggregation of marine data

Scientific data integration and aggregation is a challenging, time consuming and error prone process. Marine Data (e.g. biodiversity data, data about Fisheries and Stocks etc.) is scattered across different and heterogeneous databases, with no standard structure, not intended to interoperate with others (database silos) and the guidelines for populating these databases are also heterogeneous.

Publishing AquaMaps Native Habitat Data and Metadata as Exportable NetCDF Files

Communities interested in Niche Modeling require structured data on species distributions. Distributions are often published as text, image files, or vector data not suitable for the kind of processing scientists usually perform, while a portable self-describing format such as the NetCDF enables faster access to data and metadata, as well the creation of faster ecological models. For this reason, BlueBRIDGE decided to reduce the inertia communities encountered when dealing with geospatial data for ecological modeling purposes, significantly lowering the data preparation time.

Assignment of unique identifiers for harmonised stock and fishery data

The global fisheries community needs reliable information that identifies where stocks live, and which fisheries target them. This data is essential for management and trade, e.g. to guarantee the provenance of sustainable marine products. Until recently, data was collected by different teams with different objectives, using different formats and references, and a global integration in this sense was long overdue.

Data collation for the implementation of a Regional Database

Regional data, statistics and information are key assets to support evidence based policies making, especially to develop and monitor regional fisheries management plans (FMP) such as the regional WECAFC FMP for the flying fish, the queen conch and the Caribbean spiny lobster. The challenges in regional databases are the national sources of fisheries data and statistics. Collection of data, processing of statistics and information are carried out by national institutions with national focus on countries’ communities like small scale fishers to develop food security policies or larger scale, industrial fisheries to develop the economy while exploiting the fish resource in a sustainable way.

How to stimulate private companies to share data by safeguarding their competitive advantage

One of the major objectives of BlueBRIDGE was to improve the efficiency and support the growth of aquafarms by providing them with information on benchmarking, currently unavailable for the sector. This is a completely new perspective in a domain where stakeholders operate individually, without the ability to comprehend the details of their business performance w.r.t. their competition.

VRE as the instrument to efficiently manage specific and tailored communities needs

“Spontaneous” communities are dynamically aggregating practitioners sharing an interest for a research activity or, more generally, a task to be performed in a collaborative way. Providing these communities with working environments enabling effective work to be carried out in a shared interest is challenging due to several factors, with cost the most critical.

Publishing software in zenodo

A key aspect of an open source software project is to make the software discoverable, searchable and referenceable to the largest possible number of communities. To achieve this objective is essential to publish the software on multiple platforms/channels and provide a rich set of metadata. An additional challenge for the gCube system (the software powering the BlueBRIDGE VREs) is the high number of components (over 500) and the high number of releases (about one per month) that need to be published.

Making science reproducible

Most users of environmental datasets are trying to do reproducible and accountable science, but different post-processing workarounds and tools can lead to published results which are not repeatable or comparable.