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

The AquaINFRA project Kick-off conference took place at Aalborg University, Copenhagen from 14th - 16th February 2023 to mark the project's official launch. AquaINFRA is one of two major research actions to have been awarded €16 million by the European Commission for healthy oceans and waters by 2030.

As part of the Kick-off conference, the AquaINFRA Open-day was held on 15th February 2023 between 9:00 (CET) - 16:00 (CET).

During the Open-day event, invited experts gave a series of keynote presentations.

Nicolas Segebarth, Policy Officer, EC DG RTD set the stage in a presentation on the "Visions for Mission Ocean". Mission Ocean is the EU Mission to "Restore our Ocean and Waters" and aims to protect and restore the health of our ocean and waters by 2030 through research and innovation, citizen engagement and blue investments. It is one of five EU Missions that provide a new way to bring concrete solutions to some of our greatest challenges.

Michel Schouppe, Senior Expert, EC DG RTD presented the INFRAEOSC Call objectives, which aim to deliver a “Web of FAIR Data and Services” for Science under Horizon Europe.

Ute Gunsenheimer, Secretary General, EOSC Association AISBL gave a broad overview of the engagement activities and opportunities for cooperation among the INFRAEOSC Projects in a keynote entitled "The co-programmed EOSC Partnership: Engagement Activities for INFRAEOSC Projects".

Sara Pittonet, Blue-Cloud 2026 Project Coordinator, TRUST-IT delivered a keynote on the results of the Blue-Cloud and visions Blue-Cloud 2026.

Jannica Haldin, Deputy Executive Secretary, HELCOM discussed the data needs for holistic assessments for the Baltic Sea.

AquaINFRA partners gave a series of presentations during the event which covered a range of regional use cases, capacity building and stakeholder involvement and the interactions between Digital Twins of the Ocean (DTO) and European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) communities.

The conference also provided an opportunity for partners to discuss project management and administration (Day 1), as well as host workshops for each of the work packages (Day 3).

Attendance at the conference was for project partners. The Open-day event was open to the public for both physical and online participation.