Marine habitats present specific and one-of-a-kind issues when it comes to observing, mapping, and monitoring biodiversity in marine ecosystems. In spite of the fact that significant advancement has been made in Europe to collect, harmonise, and make available data on marine biodiversity a large portion of the data that is currently being collected is unavailable and inaccessible.
The core mission of the DTO-BioFlow Project is to unlock those “sleeping” biodiversity data enabling the sustained flow of these and new data via primary integrators and EMODnet into the EU Digital Twin Ocean. It will create a digital replica of marine biological processes transforming new and existing data flows into evidence-based knowledge.
The project aligns with the EU's Biodiversity Strategy and Nature Restoration Law and with the mission "Restore our oceans and waters by 2030", both of which advocate for the protection and restoration of land and sea regions.
Over the next four years DTO-Bioflow consortium will work on consolidating standards, quality control, communication protocols, harmonisation pipelines, data products, data models, ingestion procedures and incentives for sustainable connection to improve the interoperability and digitisation of biodiversity data. The project will also test out various technologies that are both affordable and adaptable to carry out species monitoring on a massive scale. The end-to-end approach will be demonstrated via a number of science-based use cases and via mechanisms to monitor, measure progress and drive community action towards increasing biodiversity data flows.
The DTO-BioFlow Kick off meeting
DTO-BioFlow project kicked off on September 27th in Ostend, Belgium. The meeting was hosted at the InnovOcean Campus and organised by the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ), the project's coordinator, host and technical manager of the European Marine Observation and Data Network (EMODnet) portal.
The Consortium is made up by 30 partners from 14 countries, including research, infrastructures (e.g., EMBRC, LifeWatch), networks (MBON), organisations (ICES), global aggregators and platforms (OBIS), and others. The consortium partners bring together biological monitoring infrastructures and experts, data managers, and DTO developers, marine biodiversity-relevant policy development and implementation and enabling the Mission to meet its 2030 targets.
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