Infrastructure for marine and inland water research

General Information

The overall objective of the project is to develop a virtual environment equipped with FAIR multi-disciplinary data and services to support marine and freshwater scientists and stakeholders restoring healthy oceans, seas, coastal and inland waters. The AquaINFRA virtual environment will enable the target stakeholders to store, share, access, analyse and process research data and other research digital objects from their own discipline, across research infrastructures, disciplines and national borders leveraging on EOSC and the other existing operational dataspaces. Besides supporting the ongoing development of the EOSC as an overarching research infrastructure, AquaINFRA is addressing the specific need for enabling researchers from the marine and freshwater communities to work and collaborate across those two domains. A specific goal of AquaINFRA will be to develop an EOSC based research infrastructure combining the marine and freshwater domains, which will include the development of a cross domain and cross-country search and discovery mechanism as well as building services for spatio-temporal analysis and modelling through Virtual Research Environments. A set of strategic use cases including a Pan-European use case as well as more focused use cases in the Baltic Sea and the North Sea will provide the setting for co-designing and testing services in the targeted research communities. The AquaINFRA project results are expected to contribute to the utilisation of EOSC as an overarching research infrastructure enabling collaboration across the domains of marine and freshwater scientists and stakeholders working on restoring of healthy oceans, seas, coastal and inland waters.
The Hereon team will develop an application example within AquaINFRA that has a focus on the North Sea region and specifically the Elbe catchment, the Wadden Sea but also the Oslo-fjord and Kattegat. One of the main data sources for this will be remote sensing data from the European Copernicus program on ocean (water) color. By applying state-of-the-art optical water type classification and AI-based satellite data processing, a homogeneous data quality along the aquatic continuum land-coast-ocean will be ensured. Additional in situ data from discrete samples, FerryBoxes and autonomous monitoring stations will be harmonized and made comparable.

EU-Programme Acronym and Subprogramme Area	HORIZON-INFRA-2022-EOSC-01-03
Project Type	Research & Innovation Action (RIA)
Contract Number	Grant Agreement 101094434
Co-ordinator	Aalborg Universitet (DK)

Funding for the Project (€)	Funding for Hereon (€)
7,601,825	291,295

Contact Person at Hereon

Dr. Martin Hieronymi, Institute of Carbon Cycles, Department Optical Oceanography (KCO), Phone: +49 4152 87 2028 E-mail contact

Participants

52°North Initiative for Geospatial Open Source Software GmbH (DE), Aalborg Universitet (DK), Blue Lobster IT Limited (UK), Centro De Investigacion Ecologica Yaplicaciones Forestales (ES), Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (ES), CSC - IT Center for Science (FI), Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum GmbH (DE), Finnish Environment Institute SYKE (FI), Forschungsverbund Berlin e.V. (DE), HELCOM Helsinki Commission (FI), Hochschule Bochum (DE), Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT) (DE), Latvian Institute of Aquatic Ecology (LV), National Land Survey of Finland (FI), Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NO), SINTEF (NO), Technische Universität Dresden (DE), Universita ta Malta (MT), Universität für Bodenkultur Wien (AT), University of Tartu (EE)

Last Update: 13. January 2023