Oceanography course

Welcome to the online course on Oceanography.

Together with the Technical University of Denmark, ICES and BlueBRIDGE have put together this online course as an introduction to the modern science of oceanography. This course is delivered via a BlueBRIDGE Virtual Research Environment.

This course will give you an introduction to the modern science of oceanography, the study of the world’s oceans. The world’s oceans cover 70% of the world and they represent a vast array of life and habitats. In this course you will learn about the differences and similarities between life in the ocean and life on land. Learn about the physical setting of the ocean and its structure, ocean chemistry and productivity, zooplankton adaptions, oceans and climate and get knowledge of the challenges of the ocean, pollution and how people depend on the ocean. With the knowledge provided you will be able to understand and describe fundamental differences between marine and terrestrial environments and life, apply simple concepts and insight to discuss applied problems in oceanography. You will be able to describe the main features of global ocean circulation and the processes driving them. You will also be able to construct diagrams representing simple geochemical cycles and calculate residence times. Become familiar with the minimum of physics required to understand the aquatic life at small scales and be able to apply this physics to understand small-scale living. Finally you will get insight into how the oceans regulate global climate, the drawdown of C02 and on the challenges of climate change and pollution. If you want to learn about oceanography this is the course for you.

Watch the video lectures, and test your knowledge with the provided quiz handouts. Every topic comes with a quiz handout, feel free to go through it after completing the video lectures. The course is composed by 8 training modules.

HOW TO ACCESS THE COURSE:

  1. REGISTER TO THE BlueBRIDGE Gateway to access the course VRE - Click here
  2. Click on “available courses for you”.
  3. Start the course

 

 

 

The Global Record of Stocks and Fisheries: what is it and who can use it?

GRSF is designed to handle the information on stock monitoring that countries perform directly or through the Regional Fishery Bodies (RFBs). GRSF contributes to enhance the global monitoring by i) collating records from either national or regional sources, ii) organizing and storing stock information according to specific data standards and protocols which allow comparability between records and consistency of the database, and iii) assigning and publishing Global Unique Identifier for single stock standard identification. GRSF has already gathered and organized about 3,000 stock records from 3 participating partners’ data sources. The quality control and information cleaning work is in progress (e.g., identifying/connecting duplicates), and about 2,000 records for unique stocks are expected at the end of that process.

Many stakeholders from industry, NGOs, technology companies, etc. believe the success of technology companies to develop seafood traceability solutions to meet the future global demand is based on standardized fishery identifiers. To this end, about 9,000 fishery records (fishing operations) have been also gathered through the collation, processing and harmonization of source records. Likewise for Stocks, the final published number of fishery records is expected to be lower.

The GRSF proposes a global standard for Unique Identifiers of stocks and fisheries: i) a Universally Unique Identifier, machine readable code to respond to whatever global IT standard, and ii) a Semantic Identifier, human readable code with standard codes and labels.

This tutorial presents the online catalogue of stocks and fisheries and focus on the methodology used to build the database (selection of data standards, unique identifiers logic, associated information to stock and fisheries). 

 

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE TUTORIAL

 

Innovative services to monitor the spatial distribution of human activities

In the context of the Blue Growth strategy, the need for services that collect and combine Environmental Observation (EO) data with aquaculture data has been identified by the EU. In this context, fundamental services are needed to monitor the spatial distribution of human activities including aquaculture and fishing, allowing for performance analysis based on environmental and socio-economic indicators. This tutorial highlights two VREs developed by BlueBRIDGE that support a computing intensive ontology driven feature analysis of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and multispectral optical imagery (using Sentinel-1 and -2 data, and Very High Resolution optical imagery), where the results are displayed on maps for human reviewers. The first VRE is specialised in recognizing offshore fish farming in Greece, whilst the second is specialized in identifying coastal aquaculture ponds in Indonesia. 

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE TUTORIAL

Managing tuna fisheries data at a global scale: the Tuna Atlas VRE

Tuna Fisheries

The Tuna Atlas VRE is a tool to handle public domain data from various (Tuna) Regional Fisheries Management Organizations. Tuna Atlas provides services to discover the available datasets at regional and global levels, extract them in several formats widely used by the scientific community (e.g CSV, NetCDF, SDMX) and visualize them in an interactive web-viewer of indicators and maps. It also includes tools for the users to generate their own Tuna Atlas by applying own processing (e.g applying specific choices for scientific corrections) on the tuna RFMOs data.

 

CLICK HERE TO VIEW AND DOWNLOAD THE WEBINAR PRESENTATION
CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THE TUNA ATLAS VRE
WATCH THE VIDEO RECORDING OF THE WEBINAR HERE:

 

New generation tools for Aquaculture

The tutorial presents the BlueBRIDGE tools that aquaculture producers can use to estimate the performance of their production exploiting state of the art Machine Learning methods based on the real historical production data.

WATCH THE VIDEO TUTORIAL HERE

 

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE PRESENTATION

More information

 

Aquaculture is the fastest growing animal food production sector in the world with continuously and rapid increase global production. However, the environment in which the aquaculture companies operate is highly competitive with limited margin for profit. All aquaculture producers have to face specific challenges concerning the improvement of the performance of their companies in terms of cost, feed conversion, growth rate and mortality. Simultaneously, their decisions should be sustainable and environmental friendly. Small mistakes can make the difference from profit to loss. Using the services provided by BlueBRIDGE, aquafarmers can estimate the performance of their production exploiting state of the art Machine Learning methods based on the real historical production data. Furthermore, they are able to make accurate production plans, future investment plans by exploiting the geoanalytics platform and techno-economic analysis combining production, financial and environmental data. In this way, they can make correct and timely decisions strengthen their aquaculture's position against competition.

 

PAIM: the Protected Area Impact Maps Virtual Research Environment

PAIM VRE

 

The PAIM Virtual Research Environment (VRE) provides the user with tools to visualize, analyze and report on a range of ecologically important seafloor features within marine protected areas - a key component of Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP). The interface is built around an interactive map viewer that provides visualization of a range seafloor features. The interface utilizes cloud computing to analyse the representation of seafloor features within marine protected areas for a selected exclusive economic zone or marine ecoregion. Finally, the interface presents the results of this analysis in an interactive report, with options to download the report or the results of the analysis. The interface will assist users in understanding which seafloor features occur in an area and how these are currently represented in marine protected areas. This information can be used to prioritize future planning of protected areas to include seafloor features which are poorly represented.

 

WATCH THE WEBINAR ON THE PAIM VRE

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE WEBINAR PRESENTATION

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE TUTORIAL OF THE PAIM VRE

ACCESS THE PAIM VRE

New technologies facilitating the management and assessment of data-limited fisheries

This tutorial highlights what are the growing need for data-limited methods and the limitations of currently available tools and then explores the iMarine/BlueBRIDGE solutions as a unifying framework for reproducibility. A specific focus is put on CMSY and the DLMtoolkit.

WATCH THE TUTORIAL HERE

 

Introduction to VREs for training courses

Education in an interdisciplinary scenario is usually delivered through university courses, focussed training events and workshops provided by specialised scientific institutes. As a result, there can often be a gap in making the necessary technological support available to scientists, trainees and students.

All the steps in preparing courses and workshops require:

  • manual work, which is repeated each time a new course is held.
  • installation of complex software on the users’ computers to enable use of data processing services and models that usually come under heterogeneous programming languages.
  • an extensive phase of data preparation and powerful hardware installation to allow the execution of the data-intensive models.

In addition, the interaction between teachers and students is usually limited to the duration of the face-to-face part of the course.

BlueBRIDGE offers you Virtual Research Environments (VREs) to set up and deliver training courses in a cost-effective way. The BlueBRIDGE VREs are collaborative, web-based applications which enable collaboration and integrated access to potentially unlimited digital research resources, as well as cross-disciplinary and cross-community tools and services.

Click here to understand what are the features made available by BlueBRIDGE to support scientific trainings.

BlueBRIDGE general introduction

SlideShare presentation on BlueBRIDGE project: objectives, offers, stakeholder, partners.

Using e-infrastructures for Biodiversity Conservation

 

This tutorial focuses on how the BlueBRIDGE e-Infrastructure and Virtual Research Environments can enable data sharing and experiments reproducibility and repeatability in the biodiversity conservation field. Examples of tools that can be adopted by the audience are also showcased.

Download the slideck here.

Watch the tutorial: