Oral D3 OSID & IESS

4:00 PM - 4:15 PM JST(7:00 AM - 7:15 AM UTC)

[OECfne_2-01] Digital Twin applications for dynamic assessments of marine biodiversity in European coastal waters

*Matthias Obst¹ (1. Department of Marine Sciences, University of Gothenburg (Sweden))

Biological monitoring needs to improve radically to serve our understanding of marine ecosystems and biodiversity under long-term global change and multiple stressors. Over the last decade, high-throughput monitoring technologies including genomics, hydroacoustics, telemetry, and computer vision have gained a lot of traction among marine scientists, but the quickly mounting volumes of data typically prevent scientists from obtaining deeper insights into ecosystem function and change. The European Digital Twin Ocean programme addresses this challenge and develops a digital environment that brings together data and analytical services supporting effective monitoring, restoration, and management of marine ecosystems by 2030. In 2023, the DTO-BioFlow project was initiated to support the integration of biodiversity in the European Digital Twin Ocean. Based on the ongoing work in this project, this talk will introduce some important concepts for marine biodiversity and present demonstrator use cases developed for marine ecological research. Examples feature ecological power tools and predictive applications available as open-source services through the European Digital Twin Ocean platform EDITO. The services are currently used in management of marine protected areas, offshore wind test sites, aquacultures, and for predicting marine invasive species. We will present results of scientific studies using these DTO services, explain how this approach is new, and how it can support ecosystem management as well as nature positive development. We will also highlight the advantages of using the DTO and EuroHPC infrastructures for such computationally complex and demanding tasks.