European Digital Twin Ocean Application on Habitat Suitability Mapping for the Restoration and Conservation of Marine and Coastal Ecosystems

The European Digital Twin of the Ocean (EDITO) provides an innovative set of user-driven and interactive decision-making tools. Within that framework, EDITO-Model Lab’s Focus Applications (FAs) demonstrate the capabilities of the next generation of ocean models under development in this project. We deliver our Focus Applications with a high technology readiness level across three thematic areas linked to key EU policy questions: marine biodiversity, greenhouse gas emissions from maritime shipping, and marine pollution. The Focus Applications are interactive virtual demonstrators hosted on the EDITO platform, which incorporate powerful technical components, such as data, software, and computational infrastructure, into a user-friendly environment. To ensure transparency, the input datasets, all processing tools, and generated outputs are published on the EDITO platform, enabling the fast creation of new user applications.

Our application on marine biodiversity maps habitat suitability in Marine Protected Areas (MPAs). Key habitat species, like seagrass, oyster beds, and mangroves, act as nature-based solutions against flooding while providing crucial food and shelter for protected and/or endangered species, including birds, fish, and marine mammals. EDITO’s habitat suitability maps can be used to better understand these species' behaviours and responses to changing environmental conditions, supporting more effective restoration and conservation actions. 

From a technological perspective, this application enables intermediate users to easily create reproducible habitat suitability maps anywhere along the global coast where ecological knowledge of habitat species is available. More specifically, intermediate users are enabled to (1) simulate new physical or biogeochemical spatial data using EDITO’s relocatable coastal numerical models, (2) use existing or add new ecological knowledge rules on the habitat species’ responses to physical and biogeochemical conditions, and most importantly, (3) compute habitat suitability maps by applying these ecological knowledge rules to the spatial data with the D-Eco Impact software, available from EDITO’s process catalogue.

The habitat suitability maps created by intermediate users can assist end-users, such as policymakers, with marine spatial planning and habitat restoration. This is crucial for protecting biodiversity in the global ocean and along coastal zones. The societal impact of this application is to enable the creation of third-party services that support policymakers in effectively (re-)assigning targeted Marine Protected Areas and (re-)defining active legislation. This aligns with the EU Biodiversity Strategy and international goals such as those in the EU’s Nature Restoration Law, which mandates that 30% of the ocean be conserved and 30% of degraded ecosystems be restored by 2030.