Use Cases

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.

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 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.  

JNCC produced a ‘Combined Map’ integrating data from field survey maps (mostly from the EUNIS habitat datasets collection) and the most recent version of the EMODnet Seabed Habitats broad-scale predictive habitat map available at that time. The Combined Map is a single flat layer without overlaps between habitats or component datasets, making it suitable and efficient for area calculations.

The European contribution to the Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS) is significant with EMODnet playing a pivotal role: around 20 million of these records are provided by EMODnet Biology.

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.

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.