Proposal for H2020-EINFRA ; EINFRA Topic: e-infrastructures for virtual research environments (VRE); Research and Innovation action

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1 Proposal for H2020-EINFRA ; EINFRA Topic: e-infrastructures for virtual research environments (VRE); Research and Innovation action Building Research environments for Innovation, Decision making, Governance and Education List of consortium participants Participant No Participant organisation name Country 1 (Coordinator) CNR - CONSIGLIO NAZIONALE DELLE RICERCHE 2 ERCIM GEIE France 3 ENG - ENGINEERING - INGEGNERIA INFORMATICA SPA Italy 4 NATIONAL AND KAPODISTRIAN UNIVERSITY OF ATHENS Greece 5 FAO - FOOD AND AGRICULTURE ORGANIZATION OF THE UNITED NATIONS 6 ICES - INTERNATIONAL COUNCIL FOR THE EXPLORATION OF THE SEA Italy Italy Denmark 7 FOUNDATION FOR RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY HELLAS Greece 8 IRD - INSTITUT DE RECHERCHE POUR LE DEVELOPPMENT France 9 TRUST-IT SERVICES LTD United Kingdom 10 OLOKLIROMENA PLIROFORIAKA SISTIMATA Greece 11 COMMUNICATION & INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES EXPERTS S.A. OF CONSULTING AND DEVELOPMENT SERVICES Greece 12 CLS - COLLECTE LOCALISATION SATELLITES SA France 13 GRID ARENDAL Norway 14 ASSOCIATION POLE MER BRETAGNE France BlueBRIDGE Page 1 of 10

2 1. Goal BlueBRIDGE goal develop capacity to increase our understanding of resource exploitation, environmental degradation and ecosystem management and provide informed advice to competent authorities related to the EU s Blue Growth Societal Challenges and the Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries. 2. Objectives BlueBRIDGE will deliver Virtual Research Environments (VREs) in various domains (e.g. fisheries, biology, economics, statistics, environment, mathematics, social sciences, natural sciences, computer science) that support knowledge generation from data collection and aggregation to the production of indicators and indices or other information products such as fact-sheets, reports, and data repositories. BlueBRIDGE combines the forces of European and International renowned institutions (e.g. ICES, IRD, FAO, UNEP) who share the goal of providing scientifically sound advice on the sustainable use of marine resources to their member countries, international organizations and relevant Commissions, but also at local or individual level for national academic institutions and SMEs. BlueBRIDGE responds to requirements that were identified and are already partially implemented through the imarine project. It targets four main Blue Growth Challenges: Fisheries, Aquaculture, Livelihoods and Food systems, and Ecosystem Services. BlueBRIDGE connects, over its 30 Months duration, scientists, institutions and strategic stakeholders involved in global and EU marine knowledge programmes related to ecological, societal, and economic issues (MFSD, DCF), with the specific aim to deliver self-sustaining and self-financing solutions. Strategic partnerships with commercial and inter-governmental are established to ensure future exploitation of the project resources. The overall goal will be achieved by implementing six complementary objectives that will leverage human and technology resources across all layers of existing e-infrastructures (networking, computing, data): Objective 1: Blue Assessment Support assessment of the status of stocks and produce a global record of stocks and fisheries FAO will lead the activities to deliver an open environment for stock assessment data and software, and to produce the first open global repository of stocks and fisheries that includes usage and status indicators. Objective 2: Blue Economy Support for analysing socio-economic performance of aquaculture farms and farming systems. The activities aim to create a semi-open environment for aquaculture business owners and software companies to compare and analyse the performance of their aquaculture activities through farm-level indicators. FAO does not directly partake to this activity but FAO aquaculture colleagues might be interested to contribute. Objective 3: Blue Environment Support for fisheries and aquaculture observation and habitat degradation mapping FAO will lead the activities with CLS and GRID/Arendal to provide a comprehensive environment to support spatial planning and the production of NASO relevant information by automating the analysis and classification of spatial features from satellite imagery, and embed these in spatial planning tools. Objective 4: Blue Skills BlueBRIDGE Page 2 of 10

3 Develop VREs for education and capacity building for the management of marine living resources The activity will be led by ICES, and implement their capacity building training materials and courseware for fisheries scientists and government staff in a comprehensive e-learning environment. IRD will address the needs from developing countries, and FAO can benefit through its interaction with its RFBs. Objective 5: Blue Commons Develop and deploy services and resources across Virtual Research Environments that together implement an Infrastructure Commons for the exploitation of existing infrastructure resources. FAO will not directly participate to achieve this objective, but will be involved in the requirements engineering and governance aspects of the development of such a Infrastructure Commons. Objective 6: Blue Uptake Ensure that BlueBRIDGE tools and services address the wider scientific and academic communities associated with the VREs, with a particular focus on SMEs, and to include scientific teams and organizations and policy stakeholders. FAO will ensure that the uptake will have a global outlook, and aim at the inclusion of services for resource poor entities that do not have the capacity to benefit from infrastructure advantages in isolation. BlueBRIDGE Outputs BlueBRIDGE s main outputs cover technology, research and innovation products that range from technical & innovative solutions & tools to market validation and stakeholder engagement, as illustrated in Figure 1. Figure 1. Main BlueBRIDGE Outputs BlueBRIDGE Page 3 of 10

4 3. Detailed objectives Objective1: Blue Assessment Support assessment of the status of stocks and produce a global record of stocks and fisheries The status of stocks is an essential indicator for the Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries. Assessing the status of (mainly) fish populations (stocks) is a science by itself, and is needed to understand safe harvesting limits to help conserve marine ecosystems and maintain the sustainability of aquatic food resources. It requires information and competences from e.g. biologists, ecologists, economists, and environmental scientists. Despite the availability of data and models, currently there is no open and comprehensive stock assessment environment where scientists, researchers, managers, and policy-makers can compose a work-flow that is relevant to their stock and environment, and where data and computational models are shared as easily as the resulting data-products. Catch statistics are often scattered and do not follow representation standards. In addition, the catch data is not easily linked to biological and environmental information. Moreover, there is limited exchange of models for stock assessment between scientists. This makes it difficult for models to access and embed expert knowledge. Comparing or chaining the results of two models usually requires considerable and not reusable effort. To solve these three issues, BlueBRIDGE will develop two VREs: Stock Assessment VRE: provide scientists with a collaborative and flexible environment for stock assessments and population modelling, with facilities to swap model output to larger modelling frameworks to achieve ecological- and food-web based biological assessments; Global Record of Stocks and Fisheries VRE: provide scientists with a collaborative and effective production environment for a comprehensive global reference set of unique stocks and fisheries identifiers to support regional or global policy making related to status and trends of fishery resources, and responsible trade and consumption practices. The first VRE will serve the needs of two on-going activities: IRD stock assessment and FAO s innovative approaches to single stock status assessment in data poor situations and fishery production potential of the seas. Several other projects in need of data organization and analysis have expressed interest in using the same approach (for example the BOBLME and CLME+ projects). The second VRE will provide the basis for computing regional or global indicators on the status of stocks, and will contribute to systematize a yearly production of FAO s Global State of world Marine fishery resources ( The Stock Assessment VREs will serve at multiple organizations, and aims to incorporate at least 25 algorithms which will contribute to the assessment of at least 250 stocks. The infrastructure allows the Stock Assessment VRE to publish an unlimited number of assessments. The Global Record of Stocks and Fisheries VRE can contain 2000 stocks by 2017, enabling a regular computation of more reliable indicators on stock status. Establishing the Global Record will require a significant effort to compile the cross-domain information. The global record VRE aim is to dynamically federate and harmonize three main global references of stocks (FIRMS, Ramm Legacy stocks database, and FishSource), and extract additional stocks and related information from another 5 organizations. Objective 2: Blue Economy Support for analysing socio-economic performance of aquaculture farms and farming systems. Aquaculture is one of the pillars of the EU's Blue Growth Strategy and its development can contribute to the Europe 2020 Strategy. Aquaculture is widely recognized to have the potential to boost growth and jobs in coastal and inland areas worldwide. In recent years aquaculture companies in Europe were faced with strong competition low profit margins, thus relying on high sales volumes to create adequate profits. This left few room for inefficient operations. BlueBRIDGE Page 4 of 10

5 Another major issue is the environmental impact and the environmental sustainability of the production. Aquaculture, in common with many other sectors, uses natural resources and interacts with the environment on issues of environmental protection. Efficient production management and the development of best practices respond to the above needs. It can dramatically help companies, most of which are SMEs, to improve profitability and minimize environmental impacts. BlueBRIDGE will develop two VREs addressing two relevant problems related to this challenge that build one upon the other: Performance evaluation, benchmarking and decision making in aquaculture VRE: providing capacities for companies to evaluate, benchmark and optimize their performance against best practices and the competition, and to extend the capacity of scientific research communities and policy makers to quantify and comprehend aqua-farming industry operation ensuring sustainability and development of the sector. Strategic Investment Analysis and Scientific Planning and Alerting VRE: supporting investors and scientists in the efficient identification of strategic locations of interest that meet multifactor selection criteria. The two VREs will be put in practice initially in two domains: (a) a group of aquafarming SMEs, that have been preselected and will be contributing to the benchmarking and evaluation of their production and (b) a group of individual stakeholders, not funded by the project, for evaluating potential investment scenarios. In later stages, the user base will be expanded with (a) scientists (socio-economics and marine sciences) able to exploit the knowledge, data and tools of the VRE to further expand their domain of research and their ability to respond to /locate situations of interests and (b) more SMEs coming from the aquatic farming domain that will use the VRE to exploit and share knowledge. SMEs involved will contribute corresponding funding: infrastructure resources (computation, storage, network) that will meet specific SLAs, algorithms and knowledge required to implement the VREs in question and, finally further effort for commercialization goals. Objective 3: Blue Environment Support for fisheries and aquaculture observation and habitat degradation mapping The European Commission, in the context of the Blue Growth strategy, has identified initiatives to implement the Europe 2020 Strategy that include marine spatial planning. These initiatives are compliant with the more general Law of the Sea and with the EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD), which have defined regulations aiming at reaching a Good Environmental Status (GES) of the seas. These legal obligations have created the need for services that collect and combine Environmental Observation (EO) data with farm level data and / or GIS data. In this context, fundamental services are needed to monitor the spatial distribution of human activities including aquaculture and fishing, allowing for performance analysis based on environmental and socio-economic indicators. Protected Areas (Marine Protected Areas - MPAs in aquatic ecosystems) are designed to reduce adverse impact of human activities (e.g. fishing, aquaculture, tourism) on ecosystems, and to ensure these activities are properly embedded in policy frameworks. Spatial planning instruments require capacities to monitor the integrity and spatial distribution of critical habitats, and to assess how the well-being of human communities depending on these resources can be preserved or improved. Performing such monitoring requires in-depth understanding of key aspects of human exploitation of aquatic resources. To produce the knowledge, earth observational data, ontologies, GIS, and statistics all need to be accessible to models and mapping. BlueBRIDGE can provide ancillary biodiversity, environmental and socio-economic data, and the processing capacity to deliver a high performance and reproducible spatial planning tool for scientists. Two VREs will support a computing intensive ontology driven feature analysis of SAR imagery (e.g. using Copernicus and Sentinel data), where the results are displayed on maps for human reviewers. The first VRE will specialize in recognizing aquaculture activity, while the second will specialize in identifying vegetation types. The multidisciplinary spatial planning requires collaboration between ontology experts, spatial data scientists, and spatial planning experts. BlueBRIDGE Page 5 of 10

6 Aquaculture Atlas Generation VRE: providing scientists with an innovative environment supporting the effective and efficient production of aquaculture products (maps of human activity and natural zones) contributing to an aquaculture atlas compliant with NASO standards. Protected Area Impact Maps VRE: providing scientists with an integrated environment supporting the efficient and effective production of maps of vegetation types and human impacts on them and enabling ecosystem degradation analysis. The first VRE will be initially exploited in selected regions of countries with which FAO has established close collaboration in the context of specific assistance projects, in particular Indonesia. The VRE will be used to produce NASO maps (i.e. spatial inventories of aquaculture farming systems) for 3 regions, including their validation through 15 users and their management. The Protected Area Impact Maps VRE will be initially exploited for the production of an overview of Estonian Natura 2000 sites with EO based GIS layers on inferred and validated vegetation types. Further exploitation will focus on several projects that have expressed interest for co-funded exploitation (Annex 4.2 Letters of Intent). If proven effective and efficient the identification of aquaculture sites and vegetation types through EO products combined with GIS data is likely to attract more customers. Candidate maps include mangrove areas which provide critical habitats to shrimp and groundfish resources in the Guyana-Brazil continental shelf of the Caribbean. These maps will contribute to the Decision Support System in the context of the CLME+ shrimp and groundfish management plan. Objective 4: Blue Skills Develop VREs for education and capacity building for the management of marine living resources A focus on education and capacity building is fundamental in the Blue Growth strategy, especially in view of creating knowledge alliances. In BlueBRIDGE several leading institutes (e.g. ICES, IRD, FAO) and Universities (e.g. Sorbonne University and University of Kiel) will use an e-infrastructure to organise courses, workshop and hands-on meetings to help scientists at various stages of their careers with stock assessment, oceanography and the ecosystem approach to fisheries. BlueSkills capacity building will target the following topics (i) stock assessment courses, (ii) innovative model development at workshops and meetings, (iii) marine conservation workshops, (iv) on-line classes for students in the marine biology, ecology, and oceanographic domain. BlueBRIDGE will offer the infrastructure to host existing capacity development tools in a cost effective way. In particular, it will provide VREs focussing on group training. These BlueSkills VREs, for e.g. fisheries management, biodiversity conservation, taxonomic training and oceanography, will provide access to relevant datasets and to a wide variety of computational models. BlueSkills courseware will offer simple graphical user interfaces to transparently manage several programming languages and cloud computations. The VREs will also support social networking, where students can communicate and exchange opinions, models, datasets and results about their research. BlueSkills VREs are planned to be used by ICES, IRD, in FAO projects and by other academic institutions in training courses and workshops. Around 20 BlueSkills courses are planned, aiming at more than 1000 attendees. Objective 5: Blue Commons Develop and deploy services across Virtual Research Environments that together implement an Infrastructure Commons for the exploitation of existing infrastructure resources. All previous objectives address capacity building in multidisciplinary communities. This capacity is made available through a leading e-infrastructure. The effort to ensure efficient use of these resources in working practices is significant. Also when researchers need to build their own scientific gateways on this infrastructure, they are confronted with adoption and integration costs. Others need resources to study how they can benefit from previous investments in resources that they might use for a different purpose, or that they can enrich or improve for others. BlueBRIDGE Page 6 of 10

7 BlueCommons will pursue the vision of a Hybrid Data Infrastructure. This vision is implemented by the D4Science infrastructure matches with the Infrastructure Commons concept of EGI, and relies on (i) the gcube system to provide interoperability, standards support, data access and management, and collaboration environments and (ii) the D4Science resources and practices including imarine. BlueCommons will extend both gcube and D4Science with common services for data management. gcube will be extended with (i) interoperability services with other e-infrastructures, (ii) data management facilities, and (iii) innovative resources (including data and tools) for publication and sharing. BlueCommons will offer capacity in BlueBRIDGE to share tools and knowledge. Communities such as Stock Assessment teams, Ecosystem assessment projects, or Global Record of Stocks and Fisheries can use these innovative services that enhance data transparency, trust, citation and re-usability. BlueCommons will act as a major engine to drive innovation in data management in BlueBRIDGE. Objective 6: Blue Uptake Ensure that BlueBRIDGE tools and services address the wider scientific and academic communities associated with the VREs, with a particular focus on SMEs, and to include scientific teams and organizations and policy stakeholders. BlueBRIDGE serves the needs of scientists from different domains and this provides a user base and market for services. BlueBRIDGE partners will work to align services with their production environments. The market includes SME s, and the diverse group of users for VREs. The Consortium represents the initial community and BlueBRIDGE will engage new stakeholders and stimulate the uptake of the VREs. The initial community is supported by an additional 20 organisations interested in adopting the BlueBRIDGE results (Annex 4.2 Letters of Intent) and by an External Advisory Board (Annex EAB). The BlueUptake actions ensure that BlueBRIDGE results are exploited and self-sustaining. BlueUptake will results in a set of guidelines and best practices to transfer knowledge and innovation to customers. The BlueBRIDGE consortium members will reach out to potential customers in their communities (both scientific & commercial). The best practices, together with specific training material, will be used to inform and educate scientific, industrial and commercial sector representatives, including SMEs, that operate in the BlueBRIDGE domain. The BlueUptake aim is to identify 5 SMEs that will adopt BlueBRIDGE VREs after the end of the project. The consortium will collaborate to define a detailed sustainability model for the developed VREs in terms of business, market and sustainability. BlueBRIDGE Page 7 of 10

8 4. Annexes 4.1 Annex 1; Overview of letters of intent Figure 2. Letters of Intent from committed organisations BlueBRIDGE Page 8 of 10

9 4.2 Annex 1: Table of letters of intent: Institution and focus Institute Representative Focus AGROCAMPUS OUEST, France D. Gascuel Biodiversity and environment (Confidential) FISHFARMING, Israel Confidential Socio-economics BOBLME, Thailand C.O'Brian Stock assessment CCAMLR, Australia A. Wright Stock assessment EGI, Netherlands T. Ferrari e-infrastructures ERRIN, Belgium R. Tuffs Capacity building EUDAT, Finland D. Lecarpentier e-infrastructures FISAT/TEI, Greece G. Katselis Capacity building GALAXIDI, Greece A. Pantoleimonitoy Socio-economics GEOMAR, Germany R.Froese Biodiversity and environment (Confidential) FISHFARMING, Greece Confidential Socio-economics JRC-Ispra, Italy J. Martinsohn Stock assessment NAFO, Canada M. Harley Stock assessment OpenAIRE, Greece M. Chatzopoulis e-infrastructures SUSTAINABLE FISHERIES PARTNERSHIP, USA B. Spear Stock assessment Università di Pisa, Italy M. Louise Capacity building Université Pierre et Marie Curie, France J.M. Guarini Biodiversity and environment Université Pierre et Marie Curie, France P. Koubbi Biodiversity and environment University of Thessaly, Greece E. Mente Socio-economics University of Washington, USA R. Hilborn Stock assessment WECAFC, Barbados R. van Anrooy Stock assessment BlueBRIDGE Page 9 of 10

10 4.3 Annex 2: The External Advisory Board Nicolas Bailly, Biodiversity Informatics Scientist at the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research (HCMR), Institute of Marine Biology, Biotechnology & Aquaculture (GR). gr.linkedin.com/pub/nicolasbailly/6a/11b/7bb Julian Barbière, Head of Marine Policy and Regional Coordination Section, Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) of UNESCO (FR). fr.linkedin.com/pub/barbière-julian/23/a32/447 Dr. Rainer Froese, Senior Scientist of Marine Ecology, GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel (DE). Mark Luckins, Director of IT at Marine Stewardship Council (UK). uk.linkedin.com/in/markluckins EAB members of the Stock assessment and fisheries monitoring Thematic Working Group: Jérôme Guitton, Application Developer, AGROCAMPUS OUEST, Pôle halieutique (FR). Mr. Mark Harley, Database Manager, Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization (CAN). ca.linkedin.com/in/markharley Dr. Ray Hilborn, Professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, University of Washington (USA). Braddock J. Spear, Sustainable Fisheries Partnership Systems Division Director (USA). Mr. Jann Th. Martinsohn, Joint Research Center Ispra (ITA) WECAF representative (to be nominated) BlueBRIDGE Page 10 of 10