Open Sea Lab II sets sail and promises more open data, more opportunities and even more excitement than OSLI!

EMODnet’s second Open Sea Lab (OSLII) was officially launched at a kick-off event on the 24^th of May in Brussels. It marked the opening of applications for OSLII in Ghent from 4-6 September, 2019. The entire webcast is now available online as well as the speakers’ presentations.

Revealed at the event were the three challenges for OSLII, namely: (i) Marine Environmental Management and Protection, (ii) Blue Society and Ocean Literacy, and (iii) Sustainable Blue Economy. As the concept of Open Sea Lab is to connect marine data and society, the challenges focus on how open marine data can serve societal needs.

Technical experts from EMODnet (Pascal Derycke), ICES (Neil Holdsworth) and Copernicus Marine (Fabrice Messal) demonstrated the data, products and services available via their portals and invited potential applicants to explore the diversity of resources, from data and data products on marine litter to underwater noise and from fish trawl surveys to sea ice.

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Further, we are delighted to announce that Global Fishing Watch will join us at the Open Sea Lab hackathon to discuss sustainability through transparency in global fishing activity!

Explore the new and improved interactive map viewer of
EMODnet Seabed Habitats

In May, EMODnet Seabed Habitats launched a new and improved interactive mapper. The product is the culmination of several months’ development to modernise the look and feel, introduce a range of new features and improve the ability to exchange information with external marine data sources. The technology is built entirely on open-source software (GeoServer, PostGIS, OpenLayers, Angular 7, .NET Core 2.2) and is substantially more responsive and interactive than the previous setup.

Users now have more control: the filtering of map layers became much simpler and configurable; the opacity of individual layers is now adjustable, and the display of layers can be reordered; querying layers has been streamlined; and a gazetteer allows zooming to pre-defined regions.

A series of news products released by EMODnet Geology

The EMODnet Geology team recently released a series of products related to topics including Seafloor geology, Marine minerals, Seabed substrates, Geological Events and Probabilities and Submerged landscape features.

The new Seafloor geology data layers show the underlying geology from the Ancient Past (more than 2500 Million years ago) to Quaternary deposits and modern geomorphological features, and therefore map Earth’s evolution in the European marine part. Illustrated by the Marine minerals data layer is a broad ranging systematic mapping of recorded marine minerals known to accumulate in seas surrounding Europe.

New multiscale maps of Seabed substrate illustrate seabed properties at 50k, 100k, 250k as well as 1M scales. Twelve new GIS data layers on Geological Events and Probabilities were added, representing a systematic collection of harmonised data concerning geological events, providing information on the type of events that have taken place in the past and might potentially occur again. Finally, the layer on Submerged landscapes shows a compilation of submerged landscape features and palaeo-environmental indicators, including estimated age where known.

Team at EU Datathon 2019 creates innovative app
with EMODnet and CMEMS data

This year, the third edition of the EU Datathon took place on 13 June 2019 in Brussels. Twelve teams battled it out using their skills and ideas to develop an application that offers a new service or insight using data made available by the EU institutions. The team called The Blue Time Machine (BTM) won the second price in the category ‘Tackling climate change’. They created an innovative app that visualises the complex impact of climate change using marine open data from EMODnet and Copernicus Marine (CMEMS).

June 2019