Digital Twin of the Ocean: Europe’s game-changer for sustainable seas

Artificial intelligence and other new technologies are promising to revolutionise our understanding of the ocean in the coming years. But the crucial element is data, and there’s an entire ocean of it to collect and process. To find out more, Euronews' Denis Loctier travelled to the Adriatic and the North Sea, where he met some of the many scientists gathering data helping to build EU's groundbreaking Digital Twin of the Ocean project.

Just off the coast near Miramare Castle in Trieste, bright yellow buoys mark a coastal observatory — part of Italy’s Long-Term Ecological Research Network.

Since 1986, scientists have returned to this exact spot every month to collect water samples and take various measurements, building a long-term series of scientific data that reflects changes in the coastal environment over the years. Among them is Bruno Cataletto, a marine biologist at the National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics. “We’re conducting chemical analyses, measuring nutrient levels, salinity, chlorophyll, and biological parameters. We’ll also collect samples of phytoplankton and microzooplankton and analyze them later today in the lab,” he says.

Scientists publish the collected data in online databases, making it freely accessible to marine industries like fishing. Some of these databases are quite comprehensive, even including reports from citizen scientists. Researcher Valentina Tirelli developed a free app called "avvistAPP," allowing anyone with a smartphone to report sightings of marine life, such as jellyfish, dolphins, sea turtles and alien species like the blue crab.

“When citizens send in their observations, we validate them," Tirelli says. "This combination of citizen data and researcher