Summary of eighteenth meeting of MODEG

Participation

Presentations

Consultation on Marine Knowledge

DG-MARE presented the outcome of the Green Paper consultation on marine data. They reported a general consensus that marine data ought to be more freely available, that the various EU initiatives should be more closely linked, that a mechanism was needed to help Member States define the most appropriate observation strategy and involve the private sector more. Comments were:

1. All input should not be treated the same. Some stakeholders had organised meetings and collected input from many organisations. DG-MARE said that the consultation summary aimed to cover all contributions – large or small – but that the impact assessment that followed would take into account the origin of the opinion.
2. Respondents were asked whether the seven thematic groups of EMODnet were appropriate or whether an alternative group would be better. Some of the Committee thought that the question was not well-posed. Others wondered whether fisheries should be included with biology.
3. Some were surprised that scientists had not insisted on the need for raw data. It was explained that scientists can cope quite well with data in their own domain but asking biologists to cope with multibeam echosounder data rather than a digital terrain model was not appropriate.
4. The usefulness of VMS data was questioned. It is impossible to determine whether a boat is fishing or not because the signals are too infrequent. AIS is better.
5. The usefulness of the Seventh Framework Programme project JERICO in defining requirements for new technology was highlighted.
6. Seventh Framework Programme contracts include a clause indicating that data from previous contracts must be used. This sometimes gives an advantage to incumbents. New contracts insist on open access but not free access to data.

DG-MARE asked for comments by 31 March, 2013

A portal for EMODnet

The Flemish Marine Institute are developing a portal that will provide access to data products from the separate thematic portals. The approach is to store the data products directly on the Marine Institute servers but provide access to the raw data through the thematic portals. It will be ready in the second half of 2014.

Study for impact assessment of EMODnet

COWI presented the nearly-final results of their impact assessment. Most of the discussion was on their case studies showing the potential new services that might arise from a better-orgamised marine data infrastructure. Some detailed comments were:

1. Ocean acidification will affect more than molluscs – it could affect finfish too.
2. Harmful algal blooms are a greater threat to aquaculture than jellyfish The GeoHab process was providing some information on this issue

Data Collection in Fisheries

MRAG presented the results of  a study they had completed on data collection in fisheries.

The collection of data on European fisheries costs about 2% of landed value on average and up to 6% in certain cases. However many users still report difficulties in obtaining the data in a form that is usable.  Those of MODEg who had experience with handling fisheries data thought that matters were improving although the Mediterranean is still difficult.

There had been some suggestions that regional databases would improve matters but this would be complicated for Member States with waters in more than one sea-basin.  At the moment DG-MARE is not funding regional databases. The ideal solution would be to store the data in each Member States in disaggregated form and allow users to pick them up as required. At the moment, only a limited clique of laboratories are able to analyse fish stocks and this limits innovation.

The public consultation showed large support for a fisheries portal in EMODnet.  In some respects this would be easier than for other biological data because fisheries data are more structured – age, sex, size etc – but personal and commercial confidentiality complicates matters.

Synergies with Copernicus

Physical data is available from two sources

1. Copernicus takes data directly from EuroGOOS and international operators of monitoring stations in order to provide a near-real-time service. These data sets undergo an automatic quality control and are exchanged by an FTP system set up by Copernicus and adopted by EuroGOOS.
2. These data are also fed by the operators to their national data centres for further quality checking and validation and long term archival. They can be made available through protocosl developed in SeaDataNet

EMODnet Physics joins both metadata and data streams providing discovery and access to both the data sets from monitoring stations in near-real-time (60 days sliding window), monthly history near-real-time files, both via Copernicus and long term validated archives including further metadata on observing stations, observing networks and actual data sets via SeaDataNet.

The cooperation in EMODnet Physics is one of a number of cooperations between SeaDataNet and Copernicus which are part of an Memorandum of Understanding,

 The cooperation in EMODNet Physics is encouraging more providers to join the networks and existing providers to improve the quality and quantity of their exchanges. This way more and more stations and parameters are added to the exchange and become available for near-real-time access and long term archives through the EMODNet Physics portal.

It was agreed to explore further steps for collaboration, e.g. towards the Real Time domain.