From Inland to Ocean: Leveraging IDEATION & AquaINFRA to support EU Digital Twin Ocean
EU Missions vision, particularly Adaptation to Climate Change — which calls for systemic resilience and predictive capabilities — and Restore our Ocean and Waters — which aims to protect and regenerate aquatic ecosystems through science-based solutions – requires advanced digital infrastructures capable of transforming vast environmental data to unlock its potential towards actionable knowledge.
The European Digital Twin of the Ocean (DTO) fully embodies this approach: a next-generation platform that integrates marine and freshwater data, advanced modeling, and AI-driven analytics to enable predictive simulations and “what-if” scenarios. In this way, it can empower science, policy, and industry towards addressing climate adaptation, biodiversity loss, and sustainable blue economy challenges.
The session explores how the inclusion of inland waters may accelerate this transformation. IDEATION and AquaINFRA EU projects will be used as driver of this assumption since they may contribute complementary building blocks:
● IDEATION focuses on extending the DTO to inland waters and the land–sea continuum. It introduces a community-driven knowledge approach leveraging its Multi-Stakeholder Forum to capture diverse requirements and foster co-design and co-development of digital twin services. Moreover, it introduces OpenKIWAS, a central hub for inland water data and knowledge. These outputs ensure that the DTO evolves as a user-driven ecosystem, integrating local knowledge and scientific expertise;
● AquaINFRA provides the technological backbone for cross-domain interoperability through an EOSC-compliant Virtual Research Environment (VRE). This environment enables FAIR data discovery, advanced analytics, and reproducible workflows across marine and freshwater domains. By supporting federated access to data and computing resources, AquaINFRA ensures scalability, rapid application replication, and seamless integration with European Open Science Cloud services.
Together, these initiatives can enable:
● More appropriate services to meet local and diverse stakeholder communities’ needs;
● Inland water integration for land–sea interaction modeling and monitoring/management;
● Links to Water-related data in European Data Spaces – Data Space for Sustainable Smart Cities and Communities (DS4SSCC/Geo4Water) and Green Deal (Sage) and Local Digital Twins for Smart Cities and Destination Earth/DestinE;
● Baselines for the development of digital twin applications for wider water-related scenarios, from glaciers to ocean.
The session involves key actors from the two projects that will present all the results achieved by the two projects so far and will discuss and put the basis for joint actions, including:
● A roadmap for integrating IDEATION and AquaINFRA outputs into DTO pipelines;
● Governance and business-model considerations for sustainable operations.
Presentation
