The European Marine Observation and Data Network (EMODnet): Visions and Roles of the Gateway to Marine Data in Europe

Abstract

Marine data are needed for many purposes: for acquiring a better scientific understanding of the marine environment, but also, increasingly, as marine knowledge for decision making as well as developing products and services supporting economic growth. Data must be of sufficient quality to meet the specific users' needs. It must also be accessible in a timely manner. And yet, despite being critical, this timely access to known-quality data proves challenging. Europe's marine data have traditionally been collected by a myriad of entities with the result that much of our data are scattered throughout unconnected databases and repositories. Even when data are available, they are often not compatible, making the sharing of the information and data aggregation particularly challenging. In this paper, we present how the European Marine Observation and Data network (EMODnet) has developed over the last decade to tackle these issues. Today, EMODnet is comprised of more than 150 organizations which gather marine data, metadata, and data products and make them more easily accessible for a wider range of users. EMODnet currently consists of seven sub-portals: bathymetry, geology, physics, chemistry, biology, seabed habitats, and human activities. In addition, Sea-basin Checkpoints have been established to assess the observation capacity in the North Sea, Mediterranean, Atlantic, Baltic, Artic, and Black Sea. The Checkpoints identify whether the observation infrastructure in Europe Martín Míguez et al. EMODnet: Visions and Roles meets the needs of users by undertaking a number of challenges. To complement this, a Data Ingestion Service has been set up to tackle the problem of the wealth of marine data that remain unavailable, by reaching out to data holders, explaining the benefits of sharing their data and offering a support service to assist them in releasing their data and making them available through EMODnet. The EMODnet Central Portal (www.emodnet. eu) provides a single point of access to these services, which are free to access and use. The strategic vision of EMODnet in the next decade is also presented, together with key focal areas toward a more user-oriented service, including EMODnet for business, internationalization for global users, and stakeholder engagement to connect the diverse communities across the marine knowledge value chain.

Marine monitoring in Europe: is it adequate to address environmental threats and pressures?

“…Certainly, platforms such as moorings can provide high-frequency temporal resolution (e.g. Mills et al, 2005;Greenwood et al, 2010) for the parameters they measure, predominantly physical and chemical parameters (such as temperature, salinity, light, dissolved oxygen) with biological parameters limited to phytoplankton fluorescence or chlorophyll. Monitoring more complex biological parameters (such as community species composition in the benthic and/or pelagic compartments) at high frequency appears particularly challenging because of the limited degree of development of appropriate semi-automatic tools.…”

Dissolved inorganic nutrients in the western Mediterranean Sea (2004–2017)

“…and data products such as MEDAR/MEDATLAS. In addition to that, the data assembly system EMODnet Chemistry, a leading infrastructure, is supported by the pan-European Directorate-General for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries (DG MARE;Martín Míguez et al, 2019;Tintoré et al, 2019). The dataset presented here consists of 24 oceanographic cruises ( Fig.…”

Aggregated and Validated Datasets for the European Seas: The Contribution of EMODnet Chemistry

“…EMODnet (European Marine Observation and Data Network) is the long-term marine data initiative started by DG MARE in 2009 as part of Blue Growth strategy (European Commission, 2012) to ensure that European marine data across seven discipline-based themes become easily accessible, interoperable, and free on restrictions on use (Martín Míguez et al, 2019).…”