SyncED-Ocean: Towards a Digital Twin Coastal Ocean Ecosystem

 Successful, sustainable management of coastal seas requires whole system understanding of ecosystem functioning including its physical, chemical and biological factors, integrated with knowledge of human actions and their impacts. A virtual representation of an ecosystem that suitably reacts to environmental and human pressures would therefore be extremely valuable in providing accurate prediction of future conditions, and enable testing of management and policy interventions including climate change mitigation and adaptation measures. A true Digital Twin (DT) is defined as having dynamic, two-way communication of information between its real and virtual systems, and there are few examples of environmental DTs that can demonstrate effective two-way coupling between systems.

SyncED-Ocean addresses this by building on a previous proof-of-concept to demonstrate a fully functioning Digital Twin within a highly dynamic coastal sea, integrating in situ observations, autonomous robotic vehicles, satellite data and marine ecosystem models to optimise prediction and monitoring of harmful algal blooms (HABs) and oxygen depletion events in UK coastal waters. The demonstrator was successfully completed through August and September 2024, and the framework will be presented along with lessons-learned and initial outputs.

SyncED-Ocean provides a transferable and scalable digital architecture that can be utilised for a broad range of marine science applications. Future applications will target coastal ocean resilience and sustainable management of marine resources, and will seek to better integrate social and economic models within our current environmental DT framework.