AquaINFRA will develop data and services to support marine and freshwater scientists and stakeholders

Restoring our oceans, seas, coastal and inland waters

The AquaInfra Project

The AquaINFRA project aims to develop a virtual environment equipped with FAIR multi-disciplinary data and services to support marine and freshwater scientists and stakeholders restoring healthy oceans, seas, coastal and inland waters. The AquaINFRA virtual environment will enable the target stakeholders to store, share, access, analyse and process research data and other research digital objects from their own discipline, across research infrastructures, disciplines and national borders leveraging on EOSC and the other existing operational dataspaces. Besides supporting the ongoing development of the EOSC as an overarching research infrastructure, AquaINFRA is addressing the specific need for enabling researchers from the marine and freshwater communities to work and collaborate across those two domains.

A specific goal of AquaINFRA will be to develop an EOSC based research infrastructure combining the marine and freshwater domains, which will include the development of a cross domain and cross-country search and discovery mechanism as well as building services for spatio-temporal analysis and modelling through Virtual Research Environments. A set of strategic use cases including a Pan-European use case as well as more focused use cases in the Baltic Sea, the North Sea and the Mediterranean will provide the setting for co-designing and testing services in the targeted research communities.

The AquaINFRA project results are expected to contribute to the utilisation of EOSC as an overarching research infrastructure enabling collaboration across the domains of marine and freshwater scientists and stakeholders working on restoring of healthy oceans, seas, coastal and inland waters.

Objectives

AquaINFRA's primary objective will be reached by addressing the following specific sub-objectives.
01

To seamlessly integrate the new AquaINFRA components with the EOSC- Core services and to make the AquaINFRA relevant resources discoverable and accessible via the EOSC Exchange.

02

To provide an EOSC service that allows users to seamlessly and easily find and access data from the diverse set of catalogues at the existing facilities hosting marine and freshwater data as well as associated socio- economic data.

03

To equip marine and freshwater scientists with a user environment for data harmonisation, processing, quality assessment, interaction and sharing, emphasising the pan- European seamless connectivity across the marine and freshwater realms, and integrating existing services.

04

To develop use cases for improved water quality and healthy aquatic environments to demonstrate the value of sharing open and FAIR research data and provide feedback to the EOSC Partnership.

05

To build an open and reproducible science capacity in the marine, coastal, and inland water research communities, from bachelor’s students to experienced researchers (Lifelong Learning).

06

To synergize with the oceans, seas, coastal and inland waters initiatives and the EOSC Partnership to avoid overlaps and reuse existing resources.

Partners

AquaINFRA draws from the expertise and leadership of 21 international partners.