At the Digital Ocean Forum in June 2024, the first pre-operational platform of the European Digital Twin Ocean (EU DTO) was unveiled, hailed by John Bell, Deputy Mission Manager and Director of Healthy Planet at DG Research and Innovation, as a "digital space-time machine" empowering citizens with real-time data.
The EU DTO represents a groundbreaking tool in ocean knowledge, designed to address critical environmental and societal challenges. By providing comprehensive data and predictive insights, it will enable the development of strategies to restore marine habitats, promote a sustainable blue economy and combat climate change. As a cornerstone of Mission Ocean and Waters, the platform will drive progress toward achieving 2030 targets for emissions reduction and marine protection while supporting the EU's zero pollution action plan.
Team members from EDITO-Infra, the project behind the EU DTO’s public infrastructure backbone, including Conor Delaney (EMODnet Technical Coordinator, Seascape Belgium), Marina Tonani (EDITO Project Manager, Mercator Ocean International) and Julia Vera (EDITO-Infra Communications Lead, Seascape Belgium), shared key achievements and discussed how the EU DTO will revolutionise ocean research and management.
What are the practical benefits of having a digital replica of the ocean?
Julia Vera: One practical benefit is that researchers can use these tools and services to build ‘what-if’ scenarios and applications to support decision-making. For example, they can simulate what would happen if oil was released from a ship or plastic was released from land into the marine environment, to assess the ecological damage that it could cause to a particular area, such as a marine protected site. Or they can, for example, anticipate how much CO2 would a cargo ship exhaust if it followed a particular route, and use forecasts of ocean waves and currents to help decision-makers decide which route might be optimal from the perspective of reducing the CO2 footprint of the journey.
How will EU DTO change the way researchers collect information about the marine environment?
Conor Delaney: One of the projects on board EDITO is looking at the carbon cycle and the possible impacts of the blue economy on the carbon cycle. They're a Horizon Europe project, as many others. To support their research, they need to do many things, which would have happened outside EDITO beforehand. They would have had to gather all the data together, build their own server, and do all the computation. There are costs associated with that. But now they're doing it on EDITO because a lot of the data that they need is already on EDITO, so they only need to worry about doing the computation. And that's exactly what we're trying to achieve here: reduce the duplication and increase the speed of development.
What have been the major achievements of EDITO-Infra over the past two years?
Marina Tonani: During the Digital Ocean Forum, we have been able to demonstrate that it is now possible to go from very specialised information coming from different scientific sectors, towards providing an easy layer that can be understood by anyone without a scientific background. This was showcased with some examples. One of these was the plastic tracker, where we showed, based on complex scientific simulations and observation, how plastic is moving across the ocean, where it originates, and where it will arrive. All this information was presented with a very easy layer, where you can choose your regions, see the numbers, and understand what the impact of actions taking place in one region has on other regions.
Julia Vera: It is noteworthy that, at the DOF, while the EDITO-Infra team presented the platform, external users came on board to provide their views and their feedback on how it is improving the way they do their research. And their feedback was amazing. The community has received the core infrastructure of the EU DTO with a lot of enthusiasm. I think this comes from a deep understanding of its value for marine researchers, in terms of enhancing their work, and the opportunities it opens to bring their findings to non-expert users.
How has EDITO-Infra benefited from the Mission?
Marina Tonani: What we have gained from Mission Ocean & Waters is being part of its broad, diverse, and very rich community. We will only succeed in our efforts if we are able to build meaningful links with the communities that are working on and around the marine environment. We need to reach these communities to understand their needs and collaborate with them, so that we are sure that we are integrating all the available information and exploiting this information in the right way and developing tools that are useful for their purposes. If you are not in contact with them, you cannot serve them. Having the Mission is helping tremendously in this regard.
The third phase of beta testing for EDITO-Infra launched a month ago, and access is now available to all initiatives that have asked for it, including more than 70 large European research projects. Find out more about the EU DTO and EDITO-Infra, and explore interviews with projects from Mission Ocean and Waters on the service portal.