The United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN)

On 7 & 8 September 2017, during the  3rd international UN SDSN Mediterranean Conference, distinguished speakers from Greece and abroad, including Prof. Sachs and former Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou, spoke on topics ranging from climate change, sustainable development, and environmental policy, to ecosystems and biodiversity, renewable energy, clean technology and greening of the economy. During the second day of the Conference the BlueBRIDGE project was presented as well as its goals, its connection with SDSN’s SDGs, the relationship with ICRE8 and its prospects for research and education in general, and its contribution to Blue Growth.

Cretan Prefecture, Region of Crete

During the BlueBRIDGE project, the Cretan region representatives actively participated in various BlueBRIDGE events, including dedicated working meetings with HCMR, UoA, FORTH for possible adoption of the project results, participation and dedicated speech in the RDA-Europe / BlueBRIDGE Datathon on Fisheries and Aquaculture, 15-16 June 2017, Heraklion, Crete, Greece. Finally, representative of Cretan region was also one of the participants of the BlueBRIDGE final event.

SDG14.4.1 indicator training & elearning

On 21 and 22 November 2017, during the SDG 14.4.1 global training event, moderated by FAO’s FIAF Branch Chief Dr. Y.Ye, more than 20 participants from abroad, all responsible for national fisheries data reporting mainly from developing countries, spoke on the development of the capacity to report in-country, the background of the indicator, the process to develop the indicator, and the technical progress to collate and analyze fisheries data. During the second day of the event the BlueBRIDGE VRE on SDG14.4.1 was used, mostly to run the embedded stock assessment algorithms, with CMSY particularly often used.

UK MARINE SOUTH EAST CLUSTER AND THE PORTUGAL ASSOCIATION OF THE SEA ECONOMY

Thanks to the support of the French Business & Innovation Cluster (the Pole Mer Bretagne), BlueBRIDGE was able to engage the UK Marine South East Business & Innovation Cluster and the Portuguese Association of the Sea Economy for the promotion of the call for SMEs. A set of calls have been held between BlueBRIDGE and the two clusters to explain the purpose of the call and the rules of engagements for SMEs. Both clusters actively contributed to disseminate the Call for SMEs among their members. Two UK SMEs were interested in the application.

ATHENS UNIVERSITY/DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS

Andreas A. Papandreou, Associate Professor in the Economics Department of the University of Athens and co-chair of SDSN Greece hosted the special training course ‘BLUEBRIDGE: Conceptual Framework and Cloud Infrastructure for Integrated Economic–Environmental Modeling’ in the framework of the NKUA postgraduate course Environmental Economics in March 2017, Athens. Special focus has been given to the enviromental data covered by the Blue Economy tools as well as to the socio-economic aspects of an integrated aquafarming production.  A practical usage of the AquacultureTrainingLab VRE has taken place.

T.E.I. of Western Grece/Department of Fisheries – Aquaculture Technology

The collaboration between the BlueBRIDGE project and the Department of Fisheries – Aquaculture Technology was very active and continuous. Firstly, the objectives and the progress of the project up to that date was presented in the international conference “Hydromedit 2016”, in November 2016, co-organised by the Department of Fisheries – Aquaculture Technology  together with other relative stakeholders in Messolonghi. At the same conference an interactive technical workshop presenting the d4science infrastructure and the basic architecture of VREs together with an interactive practical usage of the Aquaculture Training Lab. During 2017 more than 15 students from the Department together with 2 professors actively participated in the RDA-Europe / BlueBRIDGE Datathon on Fisheries and Aquaculture, 15-16 June 2017, Heraklion, Crete, Greece. In the dedicated training course organised for the Department for the interactive practical usage of the AquacultureTrainingLab VRE and the generic BlueBRIDGE infrastructure, more than 90 students actively participated.

BlueBRIDGE and ICRE8 Collaboration: Analysing Aquaculture Operation Performance

BlueBRIDGE and ICRE8 are working together in bringing social / environmental impacts into consideration when analysing aquaculture operation performance.

The joint work acts on conceptualizing the monetization of social / environmental impacts of aquaculture and combining this with the the specific techno-economic and production models generated in BlueBRIDGE, taking into account data and computational resources in reach.

Attica prefecture

More than 8 managers of the Fisheries and Aquafarming Directory from Attica Prefecture participated in the dedicated one day workshop on aquaculture solutions in February 2018. During this workshop and its follow-up working seminar an interactive session of the practical usage of the SustainableBlueEconomy VRE taken place.

Earth Server

EarthServer project is delivering raster management technology that is fully standards compliant (OGC reference implementation for specific standards). The project's baseline technology (Rasdaman) has been presented at the BlueBRIDGE TCom meeting, and it will be exploited if use cases show a relevant raster management need. Project's perspective on data set metadata management is diffused among the two projects via the participation of CITE in both projects.

EDISON

The EDISON Project exploited a dedicated Virtual Organisation (EDISON) and a dedicated Virtual Research Environment  (RstudioVirtualLab). The Gateway hosting the RstudioVirtualLab VRE was partially based on the same technology used by the D4Science Infrastructure (gCube Framework) and hosted by a EDISON consortium partner in Poland. They also exploited a number of gCube applications such as the Workspace, Messages, Social Networking and RStudio.

As a counterpart, the EDISON Project partner “Engineering” developed and released in gCube a first version of the Survey application (consisting in two Java portlets) that was successively enhanced and maintained by CNR. The Survey application has been used in WP8 ICES Training courses and on the Blue Datathon VRE to gather feedback from course participants.