Over the past decades, Europe has developed an impressive capability for aquatic environmental observation, data-handling and sharing, modelling and forecasting, second to none in the world. This builds upon national environmental observation and monitoring networks and programs, complemented with EU infrastructures such as the Copernicus satellite Earth observation programme and related thematic services, the European Marine Observation and Data Network (EMODnet), the Copernicus Marine Service, as well as a range of environmental European Research Infrastructures and major R&D projects.
Within this framework, since October 2019, the pilot Blue-Cloud project (www.blue-cloud.org) combined both the interests of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), aiming to provide a virtual environment with open and seamless access to services for storage, management, analysis and re-use of research data, across borders and disciplines, and the blue research communities by developing a collaborative web-based environment providing simplified access to an unprecedented wealth of multi-disciplinary datasets from observations, analytical services, and computing facilities essential for blue science.
Funded by the Horizon Europe programme, Blue-Cloud 2026 aims at a further evolution of this pilot ecosystem into a Federated European Ecosystem to deliver FAIR & Open data and analytical services, instrumental for advancing research of the global ocean, European seas, coastal & inland waters. The project will develop a thematic marine extension to EOSC for open web-based science, in support of the EU Green Deal, UN Sustainable Development Goals, the EU Destination Earth initiative, and the EU Mission “Restore Our Ocean and Waters by 2030”.
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