BlueBRIDGE, ICES and DTU have collaborated on the production of an online training course as an introduction to oceanography. The collaboration has entailed generation of the online course from scratch, from identifying acurricula, instructors, modules and the practicalities of putting the course together. This course is primarily aimed to be used by DTU students, especially those on a bachelor level, as an introduction to the topic of oceanography. The course will also be used by the ICES community, and the general public, as it will be openly available for all. The course is a recording which exists at all times, so it can be played at any time, and in any time zone. Thus, it is potentially a very long-lived product of the BlueBRIDGE project.

As part of its mandate, NOAA is involved in stock assessments in US and international waters. Information on stocks is limited in many cases and is made up of catch and sometimes effort statistics. Furthermore, NOAA has monitoring activities based on weather and climate toolkits that in the marine science domain make use of information coming from stock assessment models. Among these, NOAA has selected the CMSY model (Froese et.al, 2017) as a possible candidate to be embedded in their DLM toolkit. CMSY is one of the models hosted as-a-Service by BlueBRIDGE and thus, together with NOAA experts, BlueBRIDGE has evaluated how it could be embedded in the DLM toolkit. In particular, the activity regarded the optimization of the process through the use of cloud computing and parallel processing and the evaluation of its performance when introduced in an ecosystem monitoring tool.

IRD has set up a dedicated VRE to work with ICCAT on stock assessment of eastern bluefin tuna (ICCAT BFT-E VRE). In this VRE, VPA stock assessment model can be executed from R codes (this work has been achieved by reusing a set of codes provided by ICCAT and Ifremer colleagues chairing the group). The VRE enables to reproduce work of previous meetings and to try new parameterizations of the model for future work. The VRE achievements have been presented and discussed with the working group during two meetings. Meeting objectives were i) to update the projections analysis of the Eastern bluefin tuna stock assessment which are used as a scientific advice to define the quota and ii) to review the old data and availability of new data and update the Eastern bluefin tuna stock assessment.
 

The project identified two important methods that have already been used within the ICES advisory system and provide the required tools for DRuMFISH: CMSY (Froese et al, 2017) for data-limited cases, and the stochastic surplus production model in continuous time (SPiCT, Pedersen and Berg in press) for data-moderate cases. These methods produce consistent outputs that could be straightforwardly incorporated into the simulation tools used by DRUMFISH. Since BlueBRIDGE hosts the CMSY model as-a-Service, we organized a course to make DRuMFISH participants use it through a dedicated Virtual Research Environment. Further, we used CMSY to help scientists analyse and forecast stocks of high commercial interest, especially in the Adriatic Sea. In this way, we contributed to the project deliverables and outcome.