EU Green Week 2022 partner event - Digital solutions for a sustainable blue economy

EU Green Week is an annual opportunity to debate European environmental policy with policymakers, leading environmentalists and stakeholders from Europe and beyond. This year's edition focuses on the European Green Deal - the EU’s sustainable and transformative growth strategy for a resource-efficient and climate-neutral Europe by 2050.

The Green Week hybrid conference opens on 30 May with a high level debate on what happens to the EU environmental policy in times of crisis. The following day, three important aspects of the transformation – circular economy, zero pollution, and biodiversity, will be in the spotlight. Throughout the week, partner events will be taking place across Europe and beyond.

Blue-Cloud partner event at the EU Green Week

We took part in the EU Green Week with a Partner Event on 1 June 2022 at 15:00 CEST. In this webinar, after a brief introduction of the Blue-Cloud services, we presented three practical use cases from the international marine research community that were awarded at the Hackathon in February 2022. These applications are currently exploiting the Blue-Cloud platform to expand and improve digital solutions for a range of crucial challenges for a sustainable blue economy.

The three applications

• Sea Clearly is a tool to visualise where pollutants travel in the ocean. We focus on its application for Mediterranean aquaculture managers and policy-makers interested in impacts of (plastic) pollutants on and from aquaculture farms. Our tool can suggest  aquaculture farm locations with the lowest risk of 1) being in ocean plastic pathways and 2) wear and tear from farms reaching marine protected areas. The aim is to help aquaculture farms produce safer, pollutant-free fish for better food security and low impact to the surrounding marine environment.
• PerfeCt (Performance of Aquaculture under Climate change) is a modular geospatial web application built to forecast the effects of climate change on three key aquaculture performance factors: time-to-market, food conversion ratio, and risk of disease (vibriosis). The application is targeted to everyone interested in aquaculture farming, distribution, and decision-making processes, with main focus on policymakers, aquaculture farmers, and the general public. It aims to provide information necessary to strengthen investor confidence and support development of smart policies.
• The Wildlife Tracker for Oceans is a geo-framework dedicated to the real-time assessment of Marine Protected Areas - MPAs. The web application is able to retrieve the movement tracking data of marine megafauna in real-time visualisation using live feeds from Argos satellite system. Thanks to geospatial technologies and ocean products obtained from Copernicus Marine Service and Blue-Cloud, the geo-framework has the capability of adding temporal layers of Chl-a concentration as a proxy of Phytoplankton biomass. The Wildlife Tracker for Oceans aims to support the management of MPAs based on the interaction between marine megafauna movements and phytoplankton concentration. This project is focused in marine spatial planning and marine wildlife conservation.

Agenda

• 15:00 - Patricia Cabrera, VLIZ - The Blue-Cloud Virtual Labs for marine research
• 15:10 - Laura Gomez Navarro, Utrecht University & The Particle Trackers - Sea Clearly
• 15:20 - Ines Haberle, Ruđer Bošković Institute & AqADAPT - PerfeCt
• 15:30 - Bryan Vallejo, Digital Geography Lab & Marine Wildlife Tracker - The Wildlife Tracker for Oceans
• 15:40 - Q&A