Use Cases

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 EMODnet Human Activities portal has become a vital tool for C2Wind, a Danish company working in the wind industry. Wind farm and hydrocarbon extraction datasets are the most commonly explored datasets, identifying locations of already existing structures. Additional datasets on occasion are surveyed to provide the full extent of human activities. This crucial information is used in the preliminary phases of projects, determining areas of interest for the development of wind farm projects.

With continued development of portals and a promise to remain an open source of data, EMODnet enables its clients to become more efficient, provide better services and remain competitive in the market.

Biosfera XXI has been using EMODnet data since 2016, mainly for its marine projects, in  particular, the environmental impact assessment project “The electricity interconnection across the Biscay Gulf".

In a recent research paper (Effrosynidis et al., 2018), the Democritus University of Thrace (DUTH) aggregated CMEMS and EMODnet data to investigate the influence of environmental conditions on the presence-absence and the distribution of seagrass species over the Mediterranean Sea

EMODnet is assisting the building of the infrastructure supporting a set of studies, carried out in accordance with the Spanish Environmental Impact Assessment procedure, needed to make the territorial and environmental diagnosis of the effects caused by the project. One example of these studies is represented by the paper published by the consultancy company Biosfera XX Estudios Ambientales where the data made available by EMODnet Bathymetry, Human activities and Seabed Habitats have been used.

HeraSpace used EMODnet Human Activities as a data source to feed their neural machine-learning algorithm, which has been designed within the European Space Agency Business Centre in Madrid. The goal is to avoid that vessels might fish in vulnerable or restricted areas, by detecting their coordinates and excluding them from the predictions.

As is often the case with human activity, pipelines can be extremely useful, while at the same time very dangerous. EMODnet Human Activities recently created a dataset on offshore pipelines. Albeit incomplete, the dataset shows the true potential of EMODnet.

Petroleum companies have complete information on their own offshore installations and authorities responsible for licensing them know what is in their own waters. But until recently, there has been no complete inventory of installations for any of Europe’s sea basins.