News

What does it cost to clean up a sea, and can anyone prove the money works?

September 27th, 2026For nearly forty years, the nine countries around the Baltic Sea have been counting what runs into it. Since 1987, the Baltic Marine Environment Protection Commission, better known as HELCOM, has compiled a running stocktake of nutrients reaching the sea from farms, cities, factories, and the air, now approaching its ninth edition. It is, by any measure, a serious piece of collective science.

Planning the final stretch: AquaINFRA partners meet in Bochum

September 24th, 2026With AquaINFRA's final months now in view, project partners met in Bochum to plan how the work will be wrapped up, handed on and presented. The day combined planning sessions with a guest talk from one of Germany's most experienced water managers and a visit to the university's botanical garden.

Building in the open: how a long-term picture of the Gulf of Riga's waters gets made

June 16th, 2026Most research methods are described after the fact. A paper appears, the method works, and the years of trial and error that produced it are folded away into a tidy section headed "Methods". The AquaINFRA use case for the Daugava and the Gulf of Riga is being built the other way round: in public, on GitHub, while it is still rough. You can read the code, see the dead ends, and clone the whole thing today if you want to.

From National Databases to a European Water Data Space: The Infrastructure Challenge

June 1st, 2026Europe monitors its waters extensively. Tens of thousands of sampling stations across the continent measure river flows, lake levels, groundwater quality, nutrient concentrations, biological indicators, and dozens of other parameters. National agencies, regional authorities, and research institutions collectively hold decades of observational data - an extraordinary resource for understanding how European water systems function and how they are changing.

Freshwater Biodiversity Is Declining Faster Than Marine or Terrestrial — Why Isn't It Getting More Attention?

May 27th, 2026Rivers, lakes, and wetlands cover roughly 1 per cent of the Earth’s surface. Yet they support approximately 10 per cent of all known species and around one-third of all vertebrate species. By any measure, freshwater ecosystems punch far above their weight in biological terms.

Satellite Monitoring of Water Quality: What We Can See and What We Miss

May 19th, 2026From a single image, a satellite can map chlorophyll-a concentrations across an entire sea basin. It can track sediment plumes spreading from river mouths, detect algal blooms forming over hundreds of square kilometres, and measure sea surface temperature with a precision of fractions of a degree.

Inside the EGU 2026 AquaINFRA Workshop: Running a Real Aquatic Workflow, Live

May 11th, 2026Last Friday at the EGU General Assembly 2026 in Vienna, AquaINFRA hosted a short course that took participants from a blank screen to a fully executed environmental analysis in a single session. The workshop introduced the AquaINFRA research infrastructure and then put it to work.

Open Science Isn't Just About Access... It's About Reproducibility

April 27th, 2026Open science has become one of the defining policy ambitions of modern research. The European Commission now requires open access publication for all Horizon Europe outputs. The infrastructure for making papers freely available has never been stronger.

Europe's Water Data Is Scattered Across Hundreds of Databases. Can We Fix That?

April 22nd, 2026Try a simple exercise. Pick a European river that crosses at least two national borders, the Danube, the Rhine, the Elbe, and attempt to assemble a continuous dataset of nitrogen concentrations from source to sea, covering the last twenty years. You will need data from multiple national monitoring agencies, each with its own database, its own access procedures, and its own way of recording measurements.

Virtual Research Environments: What They Are and Why Aquatic Science Needs Them

April 14th, 2026If you are an aquatic scientist, there is a good chance your daily workflow involves downloading datasets from three or four different portals, cleaning them in R or Python on your laptop, running analyses that take hours, and then emailing scripts to a collaborator who cannot reproduce your results because they are running a different software version. This is not an exaggeration. It is the norm. Virtual research environments (VREs) offer a way out of this cycle.

What 'FAIR Data' Actually Means in Practice (And Why It's Harder Than It Sounds)

March 31st, 2026Almost everyone in research now agrees that data should be FAIR — Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. The FAIR principles, first articulated in 2016 by Wilkinson and colleagues, have become a fixture of funding proposals, institutional policies, and strategic plans across Europe and beyond.

From River Source to Open Sea: Why Europe's Water Research Needs to Break Down Its Walls

March 19th, 2026Here is a question that sounds simple but turns out to be remarkably difficult to answer: if a farmer in the Daugava River basin in Latvia changes how they manage nutrient runoff from their land, what difference does it make to the water quality of the Gulf of Riga?

Seeing the Sea from Space: How AquaINFRA is Tackling the Challenge of North Sea Water Quality Monitoring

March 12th, 2026The North Sea is one of the most intensively used marine areas on the planet. Bordered by seven countries, crossed by some of the world's busiest shipping lanes, and fed by major rivers including the Elbe, Rhine, and Glomma.

AquaINFRA and the EOSC Federation: Charting a Course for Sustainable Open Science

March 3rd, 2026On November 3, 2025, representatives from 13 research organisations and national initiatives gathered in Brussels for the EOSC Symposium to sign a Memorandum of Understanding that formally launched the European Open Science Cloud Federation.

AquaINFRA at the Ocean Sciences Meeting 2026: Advancing Modular Ocean Modelling in EOSC

February 24th, 2026This week, AquaINFRA will be represented at the Ocean Sciences Meeting 2026 in Glasgow, where Savitri Galiana (ICATMAR / ICM-CSIC) will present new developments in modular ocean circulation modelling within the AquaINFRA Virtual Research Environment.

Linking Land and Sea: The Mediterranean Water Cycle Use Case

February 12th, 2026How can we predict coastal ocean conditions by understanding the land and rivers that feed into them? The Mediterranean Use Case presented at AquaINFRA’s Oslo conference illustrates an ambitious “source-to-sea” modeling approach.

AquaINFRA’s DDAS Progress

January 8th, 2026Integrating diverse environmental data is a core challenge that AquaINFRA’s Data Discovery and Access Service (DDAS) is tackling. At the AquaINFRA conference, the DDAS development team reported significant progress in connecting various water-related data sources across Europe and beyond.

AquaINFRA Presented at the Living Data Conference in Bogotá

December 9th, 2025In October, AquaINFRA was represented at the Living Data Conference in Bogotá, Colombia, where the project contributed to discussions on advancing data-driven freshwater research

EOSC Winter School 2026

November 27th, 2025The third edition of the EOSC Winter School will take place in Nice, France from 27 to 29 January 2026, with a co-located closed meeting of the EOSC Federation Build-up Group scheduled for 26-27 January. The event is organised by EOSC Association, supported by EOSC Gravity. 

Connecting Data and Rivers: Prioritising Danube Restoration through Connectivity and Open Science

November 19th, 2025Restoring the Danube River’s health is a uniquely complex challenge. The Danube is the world’s most international river basin, flowing through 19 countries and supporting around 80 million people, and it has lost roughly 68% of its historic floodplains. Extensive habitat loss and fragmentation have severely affected biodiversity and ecosystem services.

Open-Access Data and SDMs for Danube Basin Freshwater Fish Habitat Modelling

November 19th, 2025A recent open-access study by Basooma et al. (2025) introduces a novel tool designed to simplify access to ecological trait data for freshwater species, particularly from the www.freshwaterecology.info database. The research team led by BOKU University (Vienna) and partner institutes, developed an open-source R package called fwtraits. 

Improving Species Distribution Models with specleanr

November 18th, 2025High-quality input data is crucial for reliable Species Distribution Modelling (SDM). Yet one often overlooked aspect of data quality in SDM workflows is the presence of environmental outliers in occurrence records or unusual or extreme environmental values...

AquaINFRA Project Showcases FAIR Data Innovations at ICC 2025

November 13th, 2025The AquaINFRA project, showcased how better data infrastructure can benefit marine and freshwater research across Europe at ICC 2025.

From data to impact: AquaINFRA use cases and training demonstrate the value of FAIR data sharing

June 10th, 2025Open and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data are increasingly recognised as cornerstones of modern aquatic research and water management.

AquaINFRA at EGU 2025: Advancing Reproducible and Reusable Research

June 9th, 2025The EGU General Assembly 2025 was a major success, bringing together 20,984 registered attendees from 120 countries. Of these, 18,646 joined in person in Vienna, with 2,338 participating online. Across 1,102 sessions, an impressive 18,934 presentations were delivered—56% of which were contributions from Early Career Scientists.

AquaINFRA Newsletter April 2025

March 30th, 2025We are delighted to bring you our April 2025 newsletter. We hope you will enjoy reading it and forward on to your colleagues.

AquaINFRA Workshop Report – Berlin

March 24th, 2025The AquaINFRA consortium gathered in Berlin from March 20th - 21st, for a focused two-day workshop.

From Digital Twins to Open Science Projects Linking with the European Green Deal Data Space

February 4th, 2025At the recent ESA Digital Twin Earth Components: Open Science Meeting, a poster presentation delivered on behalf of CREAF showcased three innovative projects—ILIAD, AquaINFRA, and AD4GD—that are at the forefront of integrating digital twin technology with open science initiatives.

AquaINFRA Virtual Research Environment Showcased at IMDIS 2024: Uniting Freshwater and Marine Aquatic Research

June 19th, 2024At the recent IMDIS 2024 conference, Merret Buurman from the Leibniz Institute for Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB) presented the AquaINFRA Virtual Research Environment (VRE) during the poster session. This facet of the AquaINFRA project highlights the transformative potential of server-based computing for aquatic research

AquaINFRA Newsletter June 2024

June 18th, 2024We are delighted to bring you our June 2024 newsletter. We hope you will enjoy reading it and forward on to your colleagues.

AquaINFRA Showcased at IMDIS 2024: Improving Access to Marine and Freshwater Data

June 12th, 2024The AquaINFRA project, an EU-funded initiative aimed at restoring healthy inland waters, coasts, seas, and oceans, was presented by project coordinator Henning Sten Hansen from Aalborg University at the recent IMDIS 2024 conference in Bergen, Noway.

AquaINFRA Hosts a Joint Case Study Meeting in Copenhagen

May 7th, 2024The recently concluded Joint Case Study Meeting, held from May 6th to May 8th, 2024, at the AAU campus in Copenhagen provided an opportunity for collaboration and knowledge exchange among more than 30 participants. The purpose of the meeting was to focus on the 4 AquaINFRA case study regions: The Mediterranean Sea, the Baltic Sea, the North Sea and Pan-European.

Empowering Collaborations: AquaINFRA at the EOSC Winter School 2024

February 6th, 2024The EOSC Winter School 2024, a pivotal event fostering collaboration and knowledge exchange, recently unfolded in the vibrant city of Thessaloniki, Greece, from January 29 to February 1. As a gathering of minds from diverse EOSC-related projects, the school aimed to set the stage for innovation, accelerate scientific discoveries, and empower researchers across Europe and beyond.

Call for papers: International Journal of Data Science and Analytics

December 6th, 2023The role of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Marine Science has become increasingly pivotal, influencing observation techniques, operational methodologies, and the sustainable utilisation of marine resources. This special issue invites submissions of cutting-edge, high-quality research and innovative findings within the realms of AI, data science, and scientific workflows in marine science. Contributions emphasising Open Science and the FAIR principles are strongly encouraged.

AquaINFRA Joins EuroScienceGateway to Revolutionise Multi-disciplinary Data-driven Research

November 21st, 2023EuroScienceGateway (ESG), a pioneering project in fostering collaborative scientific endeavors, welcomes AquaINFRA into its fold. AquaINFRA brings a community of marine and freshwater multi-disciplinary scientists into the ESG EOSC community.

AquaINFRA at the The Open-Earth Monitor Global Workshop 2023

October 23rd, 2023AquaINFRA partner, Kaori Otsu, Researcher at CREAF, presented a poster entitled "AquaINFRA for blue research interlinking EOSC ecosystem with Green Deal data space" at The Open-Earth Monitor Global Workshop 2023, which took place on the 4th to 8th September in Bolzano (Italy).

The AquaINFRA project officially launches at the Kick-off Conference and Open-day

February 17th, 2023The AquaINFRA project kick-off conference took place at Aalborg University, Copenhagen from 14th - 16th February 2023 to mark the project's official launch.

The European Commission awards the AquaINFRA Project 7,6 million Euro to develop an EOSC compliant innovative interaction platform for restoring healthy oceans, seas, coastal and inland waters

December 8th, 2022The AquaINFRA project is going to support the ongoing development of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) as an overarching research infrastructure, and the overall objective of the 4- year project is to develop the AquaINFRA Interaction Platform.