Digital Twins of the Ocean for a Sustainable Blue Economy - Demonstrating the Co-use of resources by Offshore Wind Energy and Low-trophic-level Aquaculture

Digital twins have the potential to revolutionize marine resource management by providing a virtual framework for assessing human-environment interactions. As a contribution to a sustainable blue economy, this study presents a digital twin concept for the shared use of resources in offshore wind farms in conjunction with low-trophic-level aquaculture. Based on a coupled numerical model of environmental physics and ecology, we extend this framework with a module for the growth of blue mussels (Mytilus edulis). In a specific use case, we demonstrate the co-use of resources by wind energy and aquaculture in the area of an existing offshore wind farm in the German Bight of the North Sea. To address stakeholder concerns about the feasibility of offshore food production, this study uses a series of what-if scenarios to show how different management decisions affect mussel growth, harvest potential, and environmental feedback. For this end, we have developed a pipeline starting from the processing of forcing data downloaded from the Copernicus Marine Services to drive the deterministic model of physics-biogeochemistry-aquaculture, via postprocessing of simulation data, to feeding of simulated scenario bundles into an interactive tool implemented on the Edito Modellab platform. This work demonstrates how simulation-based tools can support sustainable marine spatial planning and adaptive management of the blue economy.