Europe has a rich but fragmented landscape of research infrastructures. Greater integration is needed to facilitate collaboration and innovation to address global challenges and achieve healthy and sustainable marine and freshwater ecosystems.
Funded by Horizon Europe, AQUARIUS aims to enhance research capabilities across the freshwater and marine domains, enabling more holistic research in support of Mission Ocean, European Green Deal and international climate initiatives. AQUARIUS will bring together and provide transnational access to 57 different research infrastructures in an online, searchable catalogue, ranging from satellites to research vessels and from drones to laboratory research facilities.
Access to this range of research infrastructures will be provided through a competitive call process. Marine and freshwater researchers will be invited to submit project proposals that make use of multiple research infrastructure services and demonstrate how their project will contribute to at least one of the Mission Ocean objectives in one of the Mission Ocean Lighthouse Regions.
The first Transnational Access Call will be open from 11 November 2024 to 20 January 2025. The second and final call will run from 2 September 2025 to 28 October 2025. Successful projects will be offered a range of tailored training programmes to equip them with the necessary scientific and technical support to use the research infrastructures.
Aimed at early career scientists, floating universities and open calls for AQUARIUS internship programmes will be launched. Finally, the AQUARIUS website 'technical training hub', will feature a range of relevant training materials including e-learning digital resources, tools, presentations and webinars, with a focus on data stewardship and training.
AQUARIUS will implement best practices in open science and open data, making all data FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable & Reusable). Data products and knowledge will become part of leading European data infrastructures for long-term stewardship and widespread access, maximising the return on investment from AQUARIUS and successful transnational access projects. The scientific teams of the awarded projects will be invited to make use of the Blue-Cloud Virtual Research Environment.
For updates on AQUARIUS Calls and funding opportunities, please visit the project website.