A new paper signed by EMSO ERIC and other main marine Research Infrastructures in Europe recently published in Frontiers explores the urgent needs and ways to build a comprehensive and holistic framework for long-term, sustainable integrated ocean observation.
Cooperation, coordination and integration are the main priorities to enable European Research Infrastructures (RIs) to build an integrated multi-platform observing system for the understanding of the ocean’s interrelated processes, reducing overlaps, increasing efficiency and promoting scientific excellence and innovation at all levels. These are some of the main emerging needs highlighted by the representatives of the main marine RIs in European in a new policy brief paper recently published in Frontiers in Marine Science.
Some of the main European marine RIs, EMBRC, Euro-Argo, LifeWatch, DANUBIUS-RI, and EMSO, have clearly expressed their aim to strengthen collaboration favouring their synergies towards integrated multidisciplinary and cross-domain research on ocean observing systems support to address global societal challenges in the environmental field: ocean challenges are of multiple geographical scales, from local to regional or basin scale, to European and global. Europe’s marine RIs cover different domains, from seafloor to sea surface, and estuarine: covering key aspects from physics, chemistry, biology and earth science establishing of strong links among them is fundamental to better play the role of essential pillar for the European Ocean Observing System (EOOS), the coordinating framework for European in-situ ocean observation, and to continue to be aligned with the key priorities of the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development.
Specifically, the article provides a clear analysis of the present and future perspectives in the European marine observation landscape, highlighting the current crucial contribution of each RI capability to support climate and environmental policies, sustainable blue economy, preserve nature, and reverse ecosystem degradation and biodiversity decline. RIs are strategically important for Europe to lead a global movement towards a data-driven, interconnected, open digital twin that brings together different disciplines, clean technologies, public and private sectors and a broad scientific/technological community, as well as education and training.
The authors of the document demonstrate that the combined expertise and assets of Europe’s marine RIs can form a comprehensive and holistic framework for long-term, sustainable integrated marine observation that will play a key role providing in situ observations for operational services such as Copernicus programme.
Read the full paper here
The picture shows the geographical distribution of the Countries involved in the ERICs and in the Research Infrastructure. (Dañobeitia JJ, Pouliquen S, Pade N, Arvanitidis C, Sanders R, Stanica A, Gourcuff C, Petihakis G, Tegas V and Favali P (2023) The role of the marine research infrastructures in the European marine observation landscape: present and future perspectives. Front. Mar. Sci. 10:1047251. doi: 10.3389/fmars.2023.1047251)