Brief description
Over the past decades, Europe developed an impressive capability for aquatic environmental observation, data-handling and sharing, modelling and forecasting, second to none in the world. This builds upon national environmental observation and monitoring networks and programs, complemented with EU infrastructures such as the Copernicus satellite observation programme and related thematic services, the European Marine Observation and Data Network (EMODnet), as well as a range of environmental European Research Infrastructures and major R&D projects.
Within this framework, since October 2019, the pilot Blue-Cloud project (https://blue-cloud.org/about-h2020-blue-cloud) combined both the interests of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), aiming to provide a virtual environment with open and seamless access to services for storage, management, analysis and re-use of research data, across borders and disciplines, and the blue research communities by developing a collaborative web-based environment providing simplified access to an unprecedented wealth of o multi-disciplinary datasets from observations, analytical services, and computing facilities essential for blue science.
Blue-Cloud 2026 aims at a further evolution of this pilot ecosystem into a Federated European Ecosystem to deliver FAIR & Open data and analytical services, instrumental for deepening research of oceans, EU seas, coastal & inland waters. It develops a thematic marine extension to EOSC for open web-based science, serving the needs of the EU Blue Economy, Marine Environment and Marine Knowledge agendas.
The project
Over the course of 42 months starting in January 2023, Blue-Cloud 2026 will evolve the core services, integrating more blue analytical services, configuring more Virtual Labs, improving services for uptake of new data sets from a multitude of data originators (such as SeaDataNet, EurOBIS, Euro-Argo, ELIXIR-ENA, SOCAT, EcoTaxa, and ICOS-Ocean), and major e-infrastructures, namely EUDAT, D4Science, and WEkEO (CMEMS DIAS) and for discovery and access to their structured data collections.
Blue-Cloud 2026’s overall Objective is to expand the federated approach of Blue-Cloud, involving more aquatic data stakeholders, and interacting with EOSC developments, in support of the EU Green Deal, UN SDG, EU Destination Earth, and the EU Mission Starfish on healthy oceans, seas, coastal and inland waters, ultimately to provide a core data service for the Digital Twin of the Ocean.
Blue-Cloud tools and services
- Data Discovery & Access Service: An easy and FAIR service for discovering and retrieving multi-disciplinary data sets and products managed and provided by Blue Data Infrastructures.
- Virtual Research Environment: An Open Science platform for collaborative marine research, using a wide variety of datasets and analytical tools, complemented by generic services.
- Thematic Virtual Labs: Researchers work closely together with the Blue-Cloud 2026 technical team to describe Virtual Lab workflows and technical requirements.
- Workbenches for Essential Ocean Variables (EOVs): Ocean and data scientists will implement efficient workflows that allow them to harmonise, validate and qualify large and various in situ data sources, exploiting the services available in the Blue-Cloud VRE.
- Data Catalogue: The Blue-Cloud Data Catalogue includes data, products, and resources of interest for the Blue-Cloud community.
Our role
Trust-IT is the Project Coordinator and leads the activities on “Communication, Stakeholders Engagement & Uptake of Blue-Cloud VRE & services”.
Trust-IT ensures consistent and content-rich communication and dissemination of Blue-Cloud results to its relevant stakeholders, by using multiple integrated communication tools, for the roll-out of the Blue-Cloud services and demonstrate impact in the Blue Economy and the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). This is done through a “Communication, Dissemination & Stakeholders Engagement Strategy & Plan” which covers several communication activities: branding, communication materials (flyers, videos, posters, amongst others), website, social media channels, newsletters, organisation of Blue-Cloud events and presence at third-party events, training activities, and the creation of win-win synergies to enhance the scientific and economic potential and exploitation opportunities of the Blue-Cloud services, demonstrators and applications.
A range of communications materials and key documents can be found on the official Blue-Cloud Zenodo community.
Impact
Organisation of the Blue-Cloud webinar series
The first webinar introducing all demonstrators took place in June 2020, followed by a dedicated series with a webinar for each demonstrator. Up to February 2021, the webinars have been reaching a diverse audience of 600+ individuals, where around 70% of participants are from academia and research infrastructures, followed by 14% policy & funding agencies, 12% from industry and 3% NGOs.
Policy events
Trust-IT lead the organisation of two policy workshops in July and December 2020, to guide initial steps towards building the Blue-Cloud Roadmap to 2030 and to exchange reflections on the preliminary results of early stakeholder dialogue with the Blue-Cloud Community.
A third “policy dialogue” workshop was held in November 2020 with over 20 representatives from different DGs of the European Commission (including DG RTD, DG GROW, DG DEFIS, DG MARE DG CONNECT, amongst others). Trust-IT also lead the coordination with All-Atlantic Ocean Research Alliance, resulting in 3 co-located events with the Atlantic community.
Participation in the EC-funded Horizon Results Booster with 9 other marine research projects, resulting in a joint policy brief titled "Nourishing Blue Economy and Sharing Ocean Knowledge" with key recommendations.
Results
Some of the communication and engagement results of the Blue-Cloud project in numbers:
- 1500+ combined followers on Twitter and LinkedIn.
- 670+ total users in the Virtual Research Environment, 230+ of which in the demonstrators Virtual Labs hosted in the Blue-Cloud Virtual Research Environment.
- 200+ responses to the roadmap public consultations across 2020 and 2021
Onboarding your target communities to ensure uptake of research solutions requires a structured approach, deep analytical skills and the design and implementation of communication and engagement plans made up of a mix of techniques and tools.
If you need to identify and build the perfect audience for your research activity and boost your community, contact us, we’ll be happy to help.
