Use Cases

EMODnet Chemistry provided valuable contributions to the completion of  a Joint List of Litter Categories for Marine Macrolitter Monitoring that includes the litter types occurring in the coastal and marine environment. The list can be used to enable comparable monitoring across the European Seas and beyond, as well as across different compartments of the marine environment.

A joint Copernicus Marine and EMODnet data catalogue for the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) has been developed. It gathers all relevant marine data products from Copernicus Marine Service and EMODnet for all the MSFD descriptors (except Descriptor 4) in the Baltic Sea.

The Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD, 2008/56/EC) requires European threshold values (TVs) for all descriptors to be defined. In particular, for marine litter (descriptor 10), the MSFD Technical Group on Marine Litter (TG ML) decided that coastline macro litter, commonly referred as beach litter, would be the first marine litter issue to be faced.

The conservation or the achievement of the Good Environmental Status (GES) is a priority for any environmental policy mechanism of both EU and non-EU countries. Coherent data management and quality control are fundamental whenever data from different sources are required as in the case of the assessment of environmental status at regional or sub-regional scale sensu Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD).

EMODnet Chemistry delivered the first pan-European Marine Litter database. It has been used to compute EU Marine Litter quantitative Baseline, representing a fundamental step of the MSFD Implementation Strategy to provide comparable assessments and to monitor the effectiveness of litter-reduction measures.

In order to promote a harmonized approach to the evaluation of quality of data of contaminants in the ADRION region, a subset of EMODnet Chemistry data were analyzed to identify measurement units used by the different laboratories, matrix characteristics, concentration ranges as well as completeness of required metadata. According to the results, a common protocol and statistical approach to assess Quality Control of data of contaminants in the marine environment will be proposed and shared within HarmoNIA as well as within EMODnet Chemistry partnerships to improve data quality and fitness for use.

EMODnet Chemistry contributed to the Commission Staff Working Document IMPACT ASSESSMENT (Reducing Marine Litter: action on single use plastics and fishing gear), SWD(2018) 254 final, with an analysis of plastics distribution coming from for 2 "metacategories", namely fishing gear and single use plastics. The study use the ICES DATRAS available data aggregated per MSFD regions and years.

The EMODnet River data service provided by EMODnet Physics will support the LAMBDA (LAnd-Marine Boundary Development and Analysis) project to demonstrate the quality of modelling results produced by the watershed models. The EMODnet river service will enhance the Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS) by aiding in watershed models validation and quality control thus improving their forecast services.

Now the approach would be to use ICES and EMODnet Chemistry to provide a comprehensive European data source for the European Environment Agency Marine Indicators on contaminants (Biota) and Eutrophication (Chla, Nutrients) and a pipeline on oxygen saturation.

The EMODnet Chemistry portal has tested the application of INSPIRE Data Specifications to model nutrient data (MSFD Criterion D5C1 “Nutrients concentrations in water”) in the Mediterranean Sea. The use case builds on the Technical Guidelines related to Environmental Monitoring Facilities (EMF) and Oceanographic Geographical Features (OF) themes and to the Observations and Measurement (O&M) data model and was developed in collaboration with the SeaDataCloud and MEDCIS projects. The exercise demonstrated the completeness of EMODnet Chemistry metadata with respect to INSPIRE requirements and the feasibility to map EMODnet to INSPIRE models.