On 19 May 2022, the first day of European Maritime Day 2022, the European Commission Directorate General for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries (DG MARE) and the Joint Research Centre (JRC) released the fifth edition of the EU Blue Economy Report.
To assist EU Member States with reporting under MSFD, EMODnet Seabed Habitats have recently produced a summary of the extent of each MSFD Benthic Broad Habitat Type per country and sub-region. These summaries are contained within a spreadsheet and are freely available to download from the Documents and Outreach page.
An up-to-date, harmonised and validated dataset for beach litter has recently been released to the Technical Group on Marine Litter (TGML) for the implementation of the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) by EMODnet Chemistry. Twenty-two Member States corrected, updated and resubmitted these data spanning from 2015 to 2020. Currently TGML has been using this dataset to define the new EU quantitative baselines for beach litter.
On 20-21 April 2022, over 70 experts from the marine, maritime, and wider domains convened in Paris for the first Digital Ocean Forum, organised by Mercator Ocean International with the support from the European Commission. Many EMODnet experts from the Secretariat, Central Portal, Data Ingestion and thematics eg. Biology, were invited to join expert Working Groups, to further define a collective community vision for a user-driven Digital Twin Ocean.
The EMOD-network has embraced the ongoing #MakeEUBlue campaign of the EU4Ocean European Ocean Literacy Coalition, with pledges from each of the seven thematics, data ingestion, the EMODnet Secretariat and European Atlas of the Seas. The full pledges are being promoted during April and May 2022 via social media, in the weeks leading up to the EU4Ocean Summit on 20 May in Ravenna, Italy, as part of European Maritime Day 2022. Read all the pledges below, and find out more in the section “upcoming...
The EMODnet partnership held its 16th EMODnet Steering Committee and 11th Technical Working Group meetings between 26-28th April 2022. The hybrid meetings brought together more than 40 experts with local participants convening in Ostend - where the EMODnet Secretariat offices are based – together with a large online participation from members across Europe.
The Easter bells brought us the good news that the EMODnet Data Ingestion project is now entering its phase 3 for two years. This confirms the unwavering support of the team work of 43 organizations for streamlining the data ingestion process. The leadership of the project has been confirmed with the Mariene Informatie Service B.V. (MARIS) as coordinator and the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research (HCMR) as scientific coordinator.
In March 2022 another data harvest was completed. This allowed for the inclusion of eight new datasets and one update. The data were from different marine regions, including Atlantic, Mediterranean, Baltic and Black Seas. The data cover a wide taxonomic range, including fish, phytoplankton, zooplankton, benthos and macroalgae, with the oldest occurrences dating from 1933 and the most recent ones from 2020.
The Master in Sustainable Blue Growth is an initiative jointly organised by the University of Trieste and the National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics (OGS) to contribute to the EU sustainable blue economy. This latter is one of the key pillars to achieve the EU’s environmental and climate objectives according to the European Green Deal and the Recovery Plan for Europe.
