Data e-Infrastructure Initiative for Fisheries Management and Conservation of Marine Living Resources iMarine

Impact

1.11Expected impacts listed in the work programme

The essence of the iMarine initiative lies in the heart of the renewed European strategy on research with a 2020 horizon, described in the Communication from the European Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, and other bodies titled “ICT Infrastructures for e-Science” ¹⁶, which calls for “enabling Europe to become a hub of excellence for e-Science, exploiting multi-disciplinarity and global collaboration to combine complementary skills and resources in making use of computationally intensive simulations”. Establishment and operation of the iMarine data e-Infrastructure will require technological advances that will contribute significantly to the scalability, interoperability, and other desirable properties of data infrastructures beyond the present state of the art. Its advanced data management and data processing services will deal with data of unprecedented amounts and heterogeneity levels, generating high-quality information that its users will take advantage of to propel their own science or policy decision making. The disciplines and associated communities that will be drawn to the iMarine data e-Infrastructure are numerous and will be leaving their current, almost isolated, lives for the first time to address a truly complex and interdisciplinary problem of humanity, with great scientific and societal impact. The philosophy behind the iMarine data e-Infrastructure, partly expressed in the policies to emerge on its governance, will accelerate data sharing, open access, and scientific collaboration within and between the fishery management and marine living resource conservation communities. Economies of scale afforded by the use of a common data infrastructure will significantly reduce the cost of applying the principles of the Ecosystem Approach to the above endeavors. Europe will benefit tremendously for the leadership position it will assume in this un-doubtfully world-wide effort, and its knowledge workers and policy makers will always be the first beneficiaries of the technological and domain expertise created within iMarine. Last but not least, the project will have a significant, even if indirect, impact on our marine environment, safeguarding biodiversity and empowering policy makers to make wise decisions for that. All these aspects of impact that iMarine will have are elaborated in the rest of this section.

Expected Impact Listed in the Work Programme

The expected impacts listed in the Work Programme are diverse and cover several issues. An analysis of how iMarine will bring about these impacts is presented below.

Core Data Infrastructure Impacts

Increase of the scale of federation and interoperation of data infrastructures: By supporting data integration, iMarine will improve accessibility and quality of reference data regarding oceans, fisheries, ecosystems, and biodiversity, enhancing the already important role of existing  databases of biological parameters (like Fishbase), biodiversity (like OBIS) or the Global record of fishing vessels. The connection of the Ocean Expert catalogue of expertise to the data and workflow elements of the EAF dashboard, for example, will boost its use and accelerate registration of fishery expertise in that catalogue. Access to centralized and cross-verified fishery statistics (e.g., through ICIS) will facilitate the elaboration of dashboards and indicators as well as stock assessment. Nevertheless, the degree to which access to detailed fishery statistics at national and lower levels (e.g., at the fishery level) cannot be predicted, except perhaps in the cases where RFMOs will have established the relevant databases at regional level. The existence of a facility to upload national statistics onto regional and global systems through the web and to publish them using protocols such as SDMX, in a semi-automatic manner, should nonetheless be a major improvement to the present situation and an effective incentive to data providers. If the iMarine data e-Infrastructure and associated tools developed can be deployed at a regional level, detailed national statistics might be made available at that level more easily (where they are most useful), thus overcoming a major difficulty faced by RFMOs (in particular in the developing world) to maintain the software facilities aimed at organizing aggregation workflow, and facilitating their federation globally. Increased inter-operability between the current “autonomous” systems to streamline workflow. This, coupled with the on-line collaborative working capacities of iMarine and its meta-analyses and prediction support features, will drive to gains in timeliness, greater efficiency of cooperative quality control, and overall to enhanced quality of statistical sources used as basis for assessments and decision making. With iMarine, these impacts are expected to be a short term reality regarding fishery statistics workflow between Eurostat, ICES and FAO in the European context, and through the CWP¹⁷ should drain to global level in the medium term. Building of a CoP should also facilitate the uploading of the presently scattered scientific data surveys into systems like OBIS increasing the incentives of data owners (like the IRD’s ObsTuna data base, or the Fridtjoff Nansen Project) to contribute so that they may cross their datasets with others.

Better exploitation of synergies with the underlying infrastructures: The iMarine project will furnish a common layer that will connect existing data infrastructures via established and standardized interfaces, thereby bringing into its own space substantial new features and value-added tools used by practitioners in fishery management and marine living resource conservation. While based on existing robust technological frameworks that have been developed in prior projects, e.g., gCube, the data infrastructure federation thus created will furnish fundamental mechanisms to deal with thus far unrelated data sources whose richness and volume are expected to significantly accrue in the time to come. The project will consume diverse data sets from various sources, e.g., geographic information systems, as well as reports produced by individuals or groups working in the field, while it will deploy new statistical methods, mining algorithms, and standards. Dealing with all the data and service richness and the underlying computational and storage complexities without any iMarine-like support would be impossible for the EA-CoP. The iMarine data infrastructure will empower the latter to exploit new data and scenarios that were unreachable so far, obtain new perspectives, and gain deeper insights into the intricacies and complexities of fishery management and marine living resource conservation. In the context of High Seas Deep Seas fisheries for example, it will provide an unprecedented capacity to bring in the same “board room” legally established protected areas, effort data compiled from VMS, observed records on fragile ecosystems collected by fishing vessels, biodiversity modeling of fragile ecosystem, and maps of seamounts. This fact is also exemplified by ICES, very much faced with those issues, and which has provided a Letter of Support to this proposal.

Reduction of costs: The innovative technological solutions offered by iMarine will foster cohesion among the members of the EA-CoP, which will result in a significant reduction of the costs of its multidisciplinary policy creation, scientific, and social learning activities. Dependence on gCube and interoperation with several other existing data infrastructures, primarily through the D4Science data infrastructure federation, will have great benefits on system and service software development cost, as significant functionality is readily available or is only a few steps away from being so after appropriate modifications to existing software. In general, establishment of a rich set of collaborations with other EU and international organizations, initiatives, and projects as well as national centres of excellence will allow iMarine to reuse policies and technologies and interoperate with existing infrastructures. By leveraging these collaborations and by taking advantage of additional funds that some of these organizations are willing to invest in the project activities, the number of resources available to the entire effort will far surpass the funds requested strictly in this proposal, the infrastructure deployment time will be shortened, and the overall cost of building and operating the infrastructure will be reduced.

Increase of the user base and bridging across disciplines, enabling of cross-fertilisation of scientific results and favouring of innovation: Through the establishment and operation of its data e-Infrastructure, the iMarine initiative will facilitate the emergence and solidification of the EA-CoP. Smaller disparate communities, each dealing with a different aspect of fishery management or marine living resource management at various geographic granules already exist. They are the elements whose coming together will be catalyzed by the iMarine data e-Infrastructure to form an international multidisciplinary EA-CoP. Each community fosters very active interactions among participants within its boundaries but is poorly connected with the others. This is a major handicap and slows down all efforts on the way to applying EA. Based on essential needs and short term realities, organic growth of the communities towards better interactions and cross-fertilization has already started, in a “bottom-up” fashion. The process is rather slow, however, and to be expedited, there is a need for better incentives, intensified energy, and higher organization that must be instigated in a “top-down” fashion. Considering the international and authoritative status of many of the iMarine Board members, the iMarine data e-Infrastructure and its associated bodies will facilitate and accelerate this process, will bring together as its users a significant number of people from disparate disciplines, and will provide new capabilities for global-range policy making and innovative scientific advances. The iMarine data e-Infrastructure will have a highly complex and sophisticated user base with very challenging demands, in some sense going beyond the project intentions and means. This will lead to significant technological innovation for the infrastructure itself as well as scientific and political innovation for the domains of the EA-CoP.

Removal of important obstacles concerning the open access to scientific information and data: The iMarine project will put significant effort on integration, management, and handling of so far isolated heterogeneous information sources, including geo-referenced records, logbooks, maps of human activity areas, time series of key factors, socio-economic data collections, naval registers, and others. Presently, the tools available to access and operate on such data remain limited in functionality, work in isolation, are not interoperable, and most importantly, are not often widely available. The iMarine data e-Infrastructure will alleviate this situation and support data management scenarios that realize a holistic approach to the entire data life-cycle, touching upon critical functionality such as data harmonization, curation, cross-correlation, synthesis, provenance, packaging, preservation, and others. Significant amounts of new genre of high quality data will suddenly become available to the members of the EA-CoP, which will be openly accessible through the appropriate policies developed by the iMarine initiative.

Improvement of preparedness to face the data "tsunami" of the next decade: Similarly to all other sciences, the fields of fishery management and marine living resource conservation face a data “tsunami” that is continuously growing by the development of better instruments and improved simulations. The iMarine data infrastructure will play a dual role in that regard. On the one hand, it will intensify this problem, as it will facilitate the process of building very complex networks of simulation models and data analysis tools, thereby giving its users the opportunity to generate arbitrary amounts of value-added derived data that will feed various decision-making processes. On the other hand, it will offer a solution to this problem, as its data management and analysis services will be taking advantage of its underlying distributed architecture to exhibit scalability to large-scale scientific information, and to resolve the chaos evolving from parallel workflow. The predominantly data-intensive nature of the activities of the EA-CoP will be served well by all the resources that will be assembled under the iMarine umbrella, within the iMarine data e-Infrastructure proper (in excess of 250 machines, several tens of TBs of storage, and up to 1GB network) but also through its interoperation with the other infrastructures in the federation.

Progress towards the vision of open and participatory data-intensive science: As is evident from the above exposition, the iMarine initiative will bring together and facilitate coordination between data infrastructure technologist groups, public-interest organizations, research institutions, policy bodies, and others. Any boundary walls between these groups will be lowered, if not brought down, and any regional focus that such groups may have will be diluted in the context of the global iMarine environment. Whether marine scientists or data engineers or policy makers, the members of the EA-CoP will participate openly in the data management and analysis scenarios supported by the iMarine data e-Infrastructure, experiencing and contributing in the broadest possible sharing of data, knowledge, software, technologies, and other resources.

Generic tools and services developed under the e-infrastructure part of the programme could be used for the further development of research infrastructures in Europe and in particular for the implementation of clusters of ESFRI projects: The developed services will be particularly relevant for the cluster of ESFRI infrastructures in the field of environmental sciences. These infrastructures encounter difficulties with data processing (including workflow processing), including data pre-processing (raw data, data transfer, calibration, interoperability and data fusion, information representation) and data post-processing (analysis, modeling, visualization). They all deal with convoluted cases of data heterogeneity and, in general, face several problems for which they would clearly benefit from the technical solutions offered by iMarine, in terms of both the overall management of the related processing software as well as the particular scalable and interoperable functionality realized by its services. Similarly, the opposite direction is very fruitful as well, where resources developed in the context of ESFRI projects can be inherited by iMarine and propagated to other environments for the benefit of all. A specific case in point is the ESFRI LifeWatch preparatory project, which has provided a Letter of Support to this proposal. Its coordinator, Wouter Los, has expressed very vividly the impact that the developments in iMarine are expected to have on LifeWatch and vice versa: “LifeWatch expresses its interest to share the generic tools, services that will be developed by your and our project as they can contribute to the further development of an interoperable landscape of facilities in Europe”.

Added Value of Implementing the Action at European Level

The iMarine consortium is made up of strong partners carefully selected for their expertise. They are topic-specific research organizations, academic institutions, and industrial enterprises drawn widely from across the EU27, as well as high-profiled international organizations. To implement a project of the scale of iMarine involves expertise in multiple technologies and disciplines that cannot be simply found at a national level. E-Science crosses national boundaries and scientific communities collaborate widely spanning multiple states. Furthermore, collaboration at a European level integrates the best minds and resources towards materialising the Lisbon declaration. European integration promotes the transfer of know-how among the different countries, and at the same time facilitates the development of appropriate skills at the national level.

Beyond the above skills-based reasons, the nature of the proposed project itself is such that can simply not be done at any level other than the European, if not the global one. As stressed throughout the proposal text, all necessary elements of the EA-CoP are dispersed throughout the world: the scientists operate globally, the policy makers operate at a regional or national level, the datasets are typically initiated at local establishments around the world, the existing infrastructure components to be used are distributed in institutions in several countries, the interoperating infrastructures that will form the federation are administered by diverse organizations in different locations. In addition, the goal is to facilitate the recommendation of data infrastructure policies that are as global as possible. Any geographic limitation would jeopardize the achievement of the project’s objectives. Implementation at the European level ensures concentration of ample high-level resources and broad acceptability potential of its expected technological and political results.

Furthermore, the uniqueness of iMarine in having the direct involvement of international organisations such as FAO/UNESCO in key roles in the project and collaborations with EC agencies such as DG-MARE for control and surveillance data, Eurostat for fishery statistics, JRC-ISPRA for Vessel Monitoring System data (VMS data), CES for biological advice, and JRC-ISPRA for socio-economic advice, reinforces the added value of implementing the iMarine project at the European level. The close ties with CRIA of Brazil, FIN of Philippines, and NEAFC (which Secretary currently chairs the RSN¹⁸ which provides a network for most of RFMOs organizations worldwide) also serve as a clearly indication of the influence that iMarine is likely to have world-wide. All the above expand the horizons of the project to a global scale while maintaining European leadership in the domain.

External Factors Determining Achieved Impacts

Impacts on Marine Science: Fishery management and marine living resource conservation will reap tremendous benefits by having the EA-CoP house its data processing scenarios in the iMarine data e-Infrastructure. On the one hand, the latter will serve as the consumer of extremely diverse data sets from numerous sources as well as of reports produced by individuals/groups working in the field. On the other hand, it will be deployed with many services with a great variety of novel functionality, e.g., new statistical methods, mining algorithms, and standards support, which will introduce the scientists and policy makers of the EA-CoP into a brand new world of unparalleled opportunities for discovery and innovation. These would have been unimaginable before, as dealing with all aspects of the required computing paradigm has been overwhelming for the user community due to the underlying computational and storage complexities. The iMarine services will empower the EA-CoP members to exploit data and scenarios that have been beyond their reach so far, create new views, identify global-scale trends on numerous parameters of interest, and gain better insights into the intricacies of several branches of marine science.

Impacts on Information Technology and Data Infrastructures: The iMarine initiative will create a major technological shift forward. It sets to “improve the quality of decision-forming data” on state-of-the-art computing platforms that were not available before to marine scientists and naturalist. To harness all relevant data and process them fast enough to create new knowledge when needed, it will offer new distributed data management and processing techniques that capture, analyze, mine, aggregate, and synthesize data much faster than before. Likewise, controlling the idiosyncratic aspects of data sources with seemingly arbitrary heterogeneity at the syntactic and semantic levels, it will obtain improved generic mapping tools that will benefit many complex data integration efforts.

Beyond the expected technological contributions in particular service functionalities, however, the project will have significant impact in the area of data infrastructure development and operation. All service composition, workflow process execution, data processing, and knowledge creation will be enabled and orchestrated on top of an autonomic computing substrate featuring diverse capabilities. As key features of the iMarine data e-Infrastructure, its ease of use, scalability, and interoperability will enable previously unattainable, tedious and/or time-consuming computations to be expressed and executed without trouble, pushing the state of the art in distributed data management and processing and distributed data analytics.

Impacts in the Context of Other National or International Research

iMarine broaden engagement across Europe and globally by leverage existing e-Infrastructures, facilitating the integration and interoperation of resources and different stakeholders, ensuring collaboration between RIs and e-Infrastructures with the support of user communities and experts operating at global level, driven by the emerging requirements of the broader research community (e.g. ESFRI environmental cluster), and better utilizing the shared and distributed e-Infrastructure resources. Synergies with related fishery and marine initiatives (e.g. ERA-NET, Knowledge-based Bio-Economy Programme, Technology & Innovation Platforms as engines driving innovation) also have the potential for iMarine to play a part in raising awareness around the EU2020 strategy and shape future research and policy agendas. The results obtained running the EA-CoP scenarios on the iMarine data e-Infrastructure and the consequent improved understanding of marine life will affect numerous communities of scientists, managers, engineers, policy makers, and others, not only within the EU region but also around the world.

Initiative	Focus and Communities
I4Life (http://www.i4life.eu/i4Life_DoW.pdf)	Virtual Research Community connecting global projects for life on earth..
LifeWatch (http://www.lifewatch.eu)	Biodiversity
PESI (http://www.eu-nomen.eu/pesi/)	Biodiversity in Europe
GENESI-DEC (http://www.genesi-dr.eu/)	Earth Observation
METAFOR http://metaforclimate.eu/	Climate Change
GEO-Seas (http://www.geo-seas.eu/)	Geology and Geophysics
ERA-NET: Marifish (http://www.marifish.net)	European national funders of marine fisheries research
ERA-NET: ARIMNet (http://www.arimnet.net)	sustainable development of natural resources in Med
KBBE initiatives (current, e.g MEFEPO, JAKFISH)	Fisheries & Ecosystems
Horizontal initiatives covering a spectrum of domains and communities
European Aquaculture Technology & Innovation Platform (http://www.eatip.eu)	long-term sustainability of aquaculture in Europe
European Technology Platform “Food for Life”, ETP Food for Life (http://etp.ciaa.eu)	Agri-food sector innovation
BECOTEPS (http://www.plantetp.org/)	KBBE recommendations for sustainability, policy, multi-disciplinary research
The European Thematic Network on the Digital Public Domain, COMMUNIA http://communia-project.eu/	High-level policy discussion and strategic action
Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe, OpenAIRE http://www.openaire.eu/	Open Access