The Second Call for Marine Biodiversity Data Contributions is now open!

Digital Twins

The biological component of the ocean is arguably the least known and most poorly understood. Understanding the interaction of species with each other, with their environment and how these change in response to environmental and anthropogenic pressures through time will provide us with true knowledge and enables ecosystem-based management. 

This is the value of digital twins: By providing virtual representations of the ocean-integrating ocean observations, modelling, and digital infrastructures, digital twins allow us to simulate and study “what if” scenarios enabling effective conservation, management and policy development.

To unlock “sleeping” biodiversity data

Data on biodiversity comes from a variety of sources, including omics, optical identification, imaging, acoustics, and others. Although new technology (imaging, acoustics, DNA-based, satellite) enables biodiversity observations at previously unattainable scales and frequencies, many of these types of data require one or more processing steps to become digital, and thus remain unavailable and inaccessible, the so-called "sleeping data".

DTO-BioFlow will awaken "sleeping" biodiversity data, enabling the ongoing flow of these and new data into the EU Digital Twin Ocean via primary integrators and EMODnet, generating a digital replica of marine biological processes and transforming new and current data flows into evidence-based knowledge.