“Supporting Blue Growth with innovative applications based on EU e-infrastructures” was the motto of the final event of the BlueBRIDGE project, held on 14-15 February 2018 with participation of over 50 stakeholders, including policy makers, marine and maritime data practitioners, representatives from research institutions, international organisations, governments and EU-funded initiatives.

Read the article on the BlueBRIDGE final event just published by ERCIM NEWS!

Together with the Technical University of Denmark, ICES and BlueBRIDGE have put together this online course as an introduction to the modern science of oceanography. This course is delivered via a BlueBRIDGE Virtual Research Environment. Access the course now!

Aquaculture is one of the pillars of the EU's Blue Growth Strategy and its development can contribute to the Europe 2020 Strategy. Although it represents a relatively small part of the EU economy, it has the potential to boost growth and jobs in EU coastal and inland areas. In recent years aquafarming companies have been competing in an extremely low profit margin environment, thus relying on high sales volume to create adequate profits. This landscape leaves little room for inefficient operations, but this is not the only pressure for aquafarming business. Aquaculture, in common with many other sectors, uses natural resources and interacts with the environment, raising challenges of minimizing environmental impact and ensuring environmental sustainability of the production. Efficient production management and the development of best practices respond to the above needs: it can dramatically assist companies, most of which are SMEs, to improve profitability and minimize environmental impacts.

In the context of the Blue Growth strategy, the need for services that collect and combine Environmental Observation (EO) data with aquaculture data has been identified by the EU. In this context, fundamental services are needed to monitor the spatial distribution of human activities including aquaculture and fishing, allowing for performance analysis based on environmental and socio-economic indicators. This webinar highlights VREs that support a computing intensive ontology driven feature analysis of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and multispectral optical imagery (using Sentinel-1 and -2 data, and Very High Resolution optical imagery), where the results are displayed on maps for human reviewers. The first VRE is specialised in recognizing offshore fish farming in Greece, whilst the second is specialized in identifying coastal aquaculture ponds in Indonesia.