Restoring our oceans, seas, coastal and inland waters

The entire water cycle comprising oceans, seas, coastal, ground and inland water is under high (human) pressure. For this reason, the restoration and protection of our oceans and waters is one of the five EU missions that must be completed by 2030. There is no need to say that this requires research resulting in a number of heterogenous research data products that include hydrology, biodiversity, and socio-economic data. Making such data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (so-called FAIR Principles) is where the EU-funded research project AquaINFRA comes into play.

The idea is to create a federated research data infrastructure across disciplines and national borders that supports marine and freshwater scientists in sharing their research products and building on top of each other’s results. Based on the ready-to-use data and analysis workflows, 52°North cooperates with the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries to contribute to the project by developing the AquaINFRA Interaction Platform (AIP) and the Virtual Research Environment (VRE). The AIP will be the central gateway to access research products (data, software, source code, protocols, papers etc.), training materials, and the VRE. The VRE will provide notebook services (R Markdown, Jupyter notebook) to analyze the data and a canvas to create new analysis workflows. We look forward to an interesting but also challenging task.