AQUARIUS, Integrating Research Infrastructures, Connecting Scientists, and Enabling Transnational Access for Healthy and Sustainable Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems

AQUARIUS is an ongoing Horizon Europe funded project. An impressive range of 57 research infrastructure services is made available by Transnational Access (TA) Calls to include research vessels, mobile marine observation platforms, fixed marine facilities, experimental research facilities, river & basin supersites, aircraft, drones, satellite services, and sophisticated data infrastructures.

As a result of the TA projects, many new data sets in a large variety of data types are being collected by TA teams, using and combining multiple and different observation installations. A major aim of AQUARIUS is supporting the EU Mission to Restore our Ocean and waters by 2030, and other marine initiatives, including contributing to the European Digital Twin of the Ocean and the UN Decade for Ocean Sciences.

There is a strong effort in AQUARIUS to get the maximum return of investment from the TA activities. An open data policy has been adopted, implemented with a dedicated Data Management approach, to ensure that all gathered metadata and data are managed in line with the FAIR principles. They should become part of the repositories managed and operated by leading European data management infrastructures, such as SeaDataNet, EurOBIS, ELIXIR-ENA, ICOS-Ocean, and Copernicus INSTAC, for quality assurance, long term stewardship, and wide access and use. These infrastructures in turn are feeding into EMODnet, Copernicus Marine, Blue-Cloud (EOSC), Digital Twin of the Ocean (DTO) developments, and globally to e.g. GEOSS, and the UN-IOC Ocean Decade programme.

To achieve a maximum result, the TA scientific teams are being supported by data centres, experienced in marine data management, and well connected to the European data management infrastructures. Most of them are National Oceanographic Data Centres (NODCs). They provide training and coach the TA teams during the AQUARIUS data management flow scheme. This includes steps from planning to training to deployment to publishing, and a number of instruments. One of those is the AQUARIUS TA Data Summary Log App which is used by PIs of TA projects to keep an overview and index of the data collection events. It produces a list for the data centres to know what data to expect from where and who and as a checklist for the next steps. The AQUARIUS TA Data Summary Log contains only metadata and no data. As follow-up, the TA teams and assigned data centres will work on elaborating the collected data to prevailing standards and inclusion in the European repositories. That progress is made visible through the AQUARIUS Dataflow Dashboard (ADD), integrated in the AQUARIUS website. It follows the progress from planning stage through to publishing of results for each awarded TA project. The ultimate goal is to give discovery and public access to research data sets as collected and processed and data products as generated by the TA research teams as part of the AQUARIUS TA projects.

The presentation will provide more background information on the AQUARIUS project and will highlight more details about the data management approach.