EOSC-FUTURE – ENVRI-FAIR Science Project Environmental Indicators – Ocean Component – Beacon API

In the EOSC-Future project, ENVRI-FAIR partners are involved in developing two Science Projects (SPs), one about Invasive Species, and one about a Dashboard of the State of the Environment. The Dashboard should provide easy means to users to determine the state of the environment and follow trends of our Earth system for a selected number of parameters within the Earth components of Atmosphere, Ocean, and Biodiversity.

MARIS leads the development of the Ocean component in cooperation with IFREMER, OGS and NOC-BODC. It consists of a Map Viewer that displays in-situ measurements of selected Essential Ocean Variables (EOVs), namely Temperature, Oxygen, Nutrients and pH. These measurements are retrieved from a datalake of selected Blue Data Infrastructures (BDIs) such as Euro-Argo and SeaDataNet CDI using tailor-made APIs for fast sub-setting at data level.

Performance is a major challenge as users should not wait too long for retrieving and displaying the data in the Map Viewer following their selection criteria, while the origin data is organised in millions of observation files which make it hard to achieve fast responses. At MARIS there have been developments ongoing to create a system called beacon API with unique indexing system that could, on the fly, extract the specific data that was requested from millions of observation datafiles that contain multiple parameters in diverse units. We show the possibilities of this API by applying it to the SeaDataNet CDI database. The system is built in a way that it can be applied to other BDIs in the future as well and does not only function on the SeaDataNet CDI architecture.

The user interface of the map viewer is designed for (citizen) scientists and allows them to interact with the large data collections retrieving parameter values from observation data by geographical area and using sliders for date, time and depth. The in-situ values are co-located with product layers from Copernicus Marine, based upon modelling and satellite data. These in-situ data sets are also used in algorithms to generate aggregated values as dynamic trend indicators for sea regions. These are displayed at the Environmental Indicators dashboard and provide ocean trend indicators for the selected EOVs for designated areas. For more information, users can then click on such an indicator guiding them to the Map Viewer to browse deeper into the data and details facilitating the trends.