Written by Julie Bunt, DASSH Senior Data Officer, the UK Archive for Marine Species and Habitats Data
Further progress was made towards the development of a Digital Twin of the Ocean at the DTO-BioFlow General Assembly in Ostrava, Czechia in October. The DTO-BioFlow project will enable us to model multiple components of the ocean using assets such as Copernicus satellite Earth Observation, in situ (non-space) data, pan-European in situ marine environmental data and human activities data from EMODnet to produce a virtual representation of the ocean and its biological components. This will enable scientists and researchers to model changes in the environment from both anthropogenic and environmental pressures and to predict the response of species to these changes. This information will enable better management of ecosystems in the future and will support the EU to deliver on its biodiversity goals.
Chloe Figueroa Ashforth and Julie Bunt from the UK Archive for Marine Species and Habitats Data (DASSH) attended and have played a key role in identifying and unlocking ‘sleeping data’, or data that are currently unavailable or inaccessible, identifying barriers to the data flow and improving the availability of these data, ensuring that there is an improved flow into the biodiversity component of the DTO. Further progress was also made towards creating new, sustainable data pipelines which will enable valuable citizen science data to flow into the DTO from existing sources such as iNaturalist and eBird, the challenge being to create separate pipelines that filter out the marine biodiversity data from terrestrial data. Other marine biodiversity data from less established datasets such as plankton imaging, cetacean passive acoustic monitoring, biologging and genomic data will also be included, these also have their own challenges as they often involve complex data and lack standardisation.
The DTO will ultimately strengthen global efforts to protect marine biodiversity and support the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030.