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Bringing the ocean to the desktop: how SURIMI is powering the Digital Twin of the Ocean

SURIMI - VC

How will climate change reshape our oceans – and our fisheries? SURIMI brings powerful modelling to the European Digital Twin of the Ocean, helping scientists, fishers and policymakers make sustainable decisions for the future of marine life.

Fish stocks are impacted by climate change and overfishing. As the environment shifts, the question becomes: how much fish will be left in five or ten years? Climate change will not only affect fish populations but also their distribution, with some species migrating into different countries’ waters. To manage these changes effectively, we need the best possible data.  

SURIMI, a Horizon Europe Mission Ocean project, offers a cutting-edge way to explore the ocean’s future through models. It combines the behaviour of fishers, fishing communities and fish with ecological models to create nine socio-ecological models. These models evaluate fish stock health, break down complex ecosystem dynamics like predator-prey interactions, and simulate the actions of fishing fleets. Once integrated into the European Digital Twin of the Ocean (EU DTO), SURIMI will contribute to a digital replica of the ocean that shows both its natural processes and the human impact, guiding better decision-making for its future. 

With a user-friendly toolkit and intuitive graphical interface, SURIMI offers accessible tools to improve fisheries management, especially in marine management strategy evaluation, helping people who depend on fishing for their livelihood to keep doing so – sustainably.

Additionally, SURIMI will help turn the EU DTO into a powerful decision-support tool for policymakers. By addressing the impacts of climate change and human activity on marine ecosystems, its models will help shape future policy – such as reforms to the Common Fisheries Policy – by simulating socio-ecological outcomes and testing sustainable fishery management strategies.  

Reflecting on the project’s potential to make impactful data available to everyone, SURIMI coordinator Patrycja Antosz, Head of the Centre for Modeling Social Systems at NORCE Norwegian Research Centre AS, noted, “I’m excited to see that combining complex dynamic computational models of the ocean’s ecology and economics might soon be within reach of everyone interested.”

With SURIMI and other Horizon Europe Mission Ocean projects contributing to the EU DTO, Europe is turning science into action, making ocean conservation future-ready.  Discover how these initiatives are advancing the goals of Mission Ocean and Waters: protecting and restoring marine and freshwater ecosystems, cutting pollution, and building a sustainable, carbon-neutral ocean economy.

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