Use Cases

SIMCelt was a two-year cross-border project involving partners from the UK, Ireland and France. It's objectives were to support co-operation between EU Member States on the implementation of the Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP) Directive in the Celtic Seas.

Outcomes: Successfully quantifying the overall condition of European seas, authors were able to conceptualise indicator-based spatial tools to apply ecosystem-based approaches to human activities and provide practical solutions to marine governance. The report is considered a contribution to the MSFD Article 20.3 reporting and provides material which can be used to the 8^th Environment Action Plan.

How EMODnet Seabed Habitats helped the user: Contained habitat data at the resolution and coverage required.

EMODnet Seabed Habitats data enabled the mapping of potential disturbance to benthic habitats due to fishing in the north-east Atlantic. The assessment was part of the wider OSPAR Intermediate Assessment 2017, which evaluates the status of the marine environment of the North-East Atlantic.

Orsted Power (UK) Ltd are responsible for the development, construction and operation of offshore windfarms across Europe. Hornsea Project Three has been proposed in the North Sea, off the North Norfolk Coast, with the potential to be generating up to 2,400 MW of electricity, the average daily needs of approximately 2 million UK homes.  

The pan-European map presenting the distribution of modelled broad scale seabed habitats (EUSeaMap v2016) made available through the EMODnet Seabed Habitats project, was crucial in the assessment recently performed by ISPRA in collaboration with the European Environment Agency to compile information on the distribution of all  marine broad-scale habitats for the whole Western Mediterranean basin.

NIVA Denmark is a regional office under the Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA), an institution with over 50 years experience in applied aquatic science.  NIVA Denmark is focussed on applied research in aquatic ecosystems and evidence-based consultancy. Their key areas of research include eutrophication, hazardous substances, biodiversity and ecosystem health, as well as the implications of multiple human activities in aquatic environments.

The Met Office provides forecasts of the ocean properties for the European North West Shelf through the Copernicus - Marine Environment Monitoring Service. In 2018, the forecast resolution was upgraded from ~7 to ~1.5 km. Validation at the basin scale and using typical metrics with daily means penalises the high-resolution system and does not reflect the superior performance of the high-resolution system. High resolution observations in selected areas of the model domain were crucial to demonstrate the improvement of the finer resolution model.  

EMODnet meets Dr Thijs Lanckriet, Advisor at International Marine and Dredging Consultants (IMDC). International Marine and Dredging Consultants (IMDC) is a company that provides expert advice for the sustainable management and development of our natural waters for public authorities, engineering offices and contractors on a worldwide base. We offer services in several areas...

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.

The digital topographic map layers produced by EMODnet do not only show the depth of water, they also indicate where surveys are sparse and confidence in data is low. Extending this analysis for more distant waters requires collaboration with countries outside the EU who have similar programmes.