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 (www.blue-cloud.org) combined both the interests of the European Open Science Cloud, 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. 

Over the course of 42 months Blue-Cloud will evolve the Blue-Cloud 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, ultimetaly to provide a core data service for the Digital Twin of the Ocean

Blue-Cloud 2026 is co-ordinated by Trust-IT, CNR & MARIS, counting on a core team of partners such as VLIZ, Ifremer, MOI, Seascape Belgium. Overall it mobilises a solid, multidisciplinary, committed team of 40 partners from 13 EU countries. 

Check the Blue-Cloud pilot project portfolio page on the Trust-IT website.

Duration:
Jan 2023 to Jun 2026 Ongoing
Type:
Blue Economy
European Open Science Cloud (EOSC)

Our role

Blue-Cloud 2026 project coordination is managed with a tri-lateral collaboration among the Scientific and Administrative Coordinator (SAC), the Project Coordinator (PC), and the Technical Coordinator (TC). Trust-IT, in the person of Sara Pittonet Gaiarin, Senior Project Manager and shareholder at Trust-IT, is the Project Coordinator (PC). Trust-IT coordinates communications with the project partners, ensuring progress monitoring, delivery check, and time keeping of project deliverables and milestones, overlooking also at establishing collaborative liaisons with other projects and initiatives at European and international level. 

Trust-IT also ensures consistent and content-rich communication and dissemination of Blue-Cloud results to its relevant stakeholders in the Blue Economy, the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and the Digital Twin of the Oceans. This is done through a “Communication, Dissemination & Stakeholders Engagement Strategy & Plan” which covers four specialised campaigns that will be carried out from M01 through M42 including a Training Academy to deliver online courses on how to make best use of Blue-Cloud services, and on how to use and share FAIR data from marine Infrastructures and data repositories.

Results

The main results, once delivered, will include: 

  • 14 Blue Data Infrastructures federated via DD&AS
  • >400 registered users from >25 countries
    • 3.000 total users in the Blue-Cloud Virtual Research Environment; 
    • 2,000 data analytics sessions per month
  • >5 VLabs 
  • >10 Open aggregated and harmonised EOV datasets 
  • >200 materials available in the online Training catalogue with 12 Online training courses and a Catalogue of FAIR-related training materials from Marine BDIs
  • >500 trained participants in the Training Academy
  • 1 long-term Strategic Roadmap to guide the community towards a shared Vision & Mission in 2030. 
  • 1 hackathon
  • >10 Scientific papers/publication
  • 10+ ESEB members regularly engaged
  • >3,000 engaged Blue community
  • 3 Annual Impact events
  • 1 DTO Task Force
  • >10 synergies with external initiatives 

A range of communications materials and key documents can be found on the official Blue-Cloud Zenodo community.

Follow the activities of Blue-Cloud 2026. Visit www.blue-cloud.org and follow its social channels:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/bluecloudeu 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/blue-cloud-org/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/BlueCloudorg
 

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