Selected data providers

Nine projects were chosen as recipients of the DTO-BioFlow Open Call. This initiative aimed to identify data holders capable of providing sustained, long-term access to previously inaccessible data through EMODnet Biology to the EU DTO. The selected projects participated in a data training workshop held in April 2024. The workshop took place at the InnovOcean Campus of the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) in Ostend, Belgium, from April 22nd to 24th.

Meet the winner projects below!

Marine Megafauna Data for EU Digital Twin Ocean

Beneficiary
Bangor University School of Ocean Sciences
The purpose of this project is to make available for re-use previously inaccessible unique multi-decadal data on marine megafauna in European seas. These biodiversity data have been collected by scientists, citizen scientists and member of the public for more than 30 years in observing programmes carried out by the UK Sea Watch Foundation (SWF) and its partners.

Futurismo: linking whale watching tourism with cetacean research in the Azores

Beneficiary
Futurismo Azores Adventures Portugal
Whale watching has become one of the most important touristic activities in the Azores archipelago (Portugal). The number of commercial tours has increased over the years, providing therefore an increasing number of opportunities for cetacean data collection at sea. Futurismo Azores Adventures is one of the leading companies in the region and has been registering data during their trips consistently since 2008.

KAIROS - ZooplanKton data from Arctic marIne time-seRies to understand biOdiversity dynamicS

Beneficiary
Institute of Polar Sciences, National Research Council (ISP-CNR)
The Arctic is a climate change hot spot, with ocean warming, freshening, sea-ice decline, linked to changing atmospheric and terrestrial environments. These processes are imprints of Atlantification, a progressive propagation of the Atlantic signal into the Arctic Ocean, significantly influencing climate, ecosystems, and marine food web. In the Svalbard archipelago global warming is notably accelerated.

Integration of southeastern Mediterranean long-term biodiversity data into EU-DTO

Beneficiary
Israel Oceanographic and Limnological Research
The Israeli territorial waters and its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) are delimited by a rectangular polygon parallel to the shore and spans the depth range of 0-2000 m and an area of ~26,000 square Km. In 2023, The Israel Oceanographic and Limnological Research (IOLR) opened a publicly available database, designated ISRAMARBIO, which is aimed at including all the biotic data collected in the last ~130 years along the Mediterranean waters of Israel as well as selected adjacent interesting sites located in the South Eastern part of the Mediterranean.

Management and publication of Marine Characterisation Research Project data

Beneficiary
Menter Môn

The Marine Characterisation Research Project (MCRP), managed by Menter Môn, is an innovative research and development project which is collecting an extensive range of data on the marine environment in North West Wales.

Pipeline for biodiversity data from the British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC) to the OBIS network and EMODnet.

Beneficiary
National Oceanography Centre
While BODC is a key provider of physical, geophysical and biogeochemical data to EMODnet Physics, Bathymetry and Chemistry, we do not currently have the capacity to easily provide biodiversity data to EurOBIS and EMODnet Biology. The reason for this is that the Darwin Core Archive (DwCA) format was never integrated into BODC’s basic workflows. BODC manages and ingests plankton and, to a lesser extent benthos data, alongside concomitant environmental measurements, into its databases, but there is currently no mechanism to make these data available in DwCA format.

Managing and publishing biodiversity data from Nord University

Beneficiary
Nord University
Nord University initiated a standardised zooplankton biannual time-series in 1980, now replicated in three fjords. More recently, a benthos time-series and two livestreaming undersea videos have been established. Funding has also been obtained to develop automated image analysis (AI) of these samples.

Strandaanspoelsel (beach washup) Monitoring Project (SMP)

Beneficiary
stichting ANEMOON

The SMP was started in 1997 to track changes in populations of organisms along the Dutch coastline and is carried out by volunteer observers (citizen scientists). These observers walk a fixed SMP route (SMP-traject) along the beach once every two or four weeks at low tide at one of our fourteen SMP-trajects along the Dutch shoreline.
They register all washed-ashore organisms and/or their remains. These data are used to calculate trends and indicate changes in the species populations living in the nearshore zone.

Plankton Imaging Data Flow: Establishing a European data flow for phyto- and microzooplankton data from automated AI-assisted imaging in flow analyses

Beneficiary
Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute Sweden
The absence of a standardized data format for automated classified image data from Imaging Flow Cytobots (IFCBs) in Europe has led to decentralized storage practices, with each partner within the European IFCB network managing their own datasets.