BlueBRIDGE | Gateway
This web page was an access point to a number of VREs deployed and operated in the context of the BlueBRIDGE project. Thanks to the iMarine initiative, some of these VREs are nowadays operated and accessible via the iMarine Gateway, a cloud-based community platform powered by D4Science to help improve fisheries management. Other VREs are openly accessible via the D4Science Gateway.
About BlueBRIDGE and i-Marine
This web page was an access point to a number of Virtual Research Environments deployed and operated in the context of the BlueBRIDGE project, which overall objective was to support capacity building in interdisciplinary research communities actively involved in increasing scientific knowledge about resource overexploitation, degraded environment and ecosystem with the aim of providing a more solid ground for informed advice to competent authorities and to enlarge the spectrum of growth opportunities as addressed by the Blue Growth Societal Challenge.
This BlueBRIDGE gateway has served more than 2.500 users. These users will be supported thanks to the iMarine initiative, which was launched in 2015 to establish and operate an e-infrastructure supporting the principles of the ecosystem approach to fisheries management and conservation of marine living resources, and it ultimately aims at supporting FAO's Blue Growth Initiative.
Read more at FAO - News Article: FAO and Italy’s National Research Council strengthen iMarine ties.
i-Marine supported VREs
Aquaculture Atlas Production System
"to support the generation and the review of aquaculture maps for offshore fish farms and coastal ponds. These maps are generated using satellite Earth Observation imagery."
Global Record of Stocks and Fisheries
"to provide registered users with an environment and tools for accessing stocks and fisheries information collated from three database sources: FIRMS, RAM and FishSource."
Tuna Atlas
"provides services to discover the available datasets at regional and global levels, extract them in several formats and visualise them in an interactive web-viewer of indicators and maps."
Coordinating Working Parties Secretariat
"to support the development and maintenance of the Catalog of the Coordinating Working Parties (CWP) on Fisheries Statistics."
Protected Areas Impact Maps
"to provide scientists with tools to visualise, analyse and report on a range of ecologically important seafloor features within marine protected areas - a key component of Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP)."
Capacity Building for SDG-14.4.1
"to support the FAO Capacity Development Workshops on Stock Status Assessment and Estimation of SDG Indicator 14.4.1 led by Dr. Yimin YE and Dr. Anne-Elise NIEBLAS."
Stock Assessment
"to support the development and validation of data services in support to stock assessment, and accessible for developers and advanced users only."
Vulnerable Marine Ecosystems
"to support the development and storage of FAO Fact Sheets on Vulnerable Marine Ecosystems (VMEs)."
WECAFC Regional Database
"to support the development of the “WECAFC - FIRMS project" during its two successive phases between 2015 and 2019 and the coming third phase."
D4Science supported VREs
"to support decision makers and scientists in predicting the near-future spread of an invasive species (possibly alien) in a new environment."
"a small collection of generic Machine Learning (ML) and Statistical Processing algorithms for Big Data, the new user can easily get acquainted with the infrastructure and its main facilities."
"provides its users with a service to compare a set of scientific names against taxonomic reference lists including recognised ones like Catalogue of Life"
"a collection of applications that allow scholars to perform complete experiments involving single individuals or groups of marine species"
"conceived to provide its users with a complete development and integration environment for R language."
"enabling users to access a fully-fledged RStudio® working environment directly from the VRE, integrated with the rest of facilities."
"to support the design of Data Mining techniques to biological data. The methods are executed in a distributed fashion on the e-Infrastructure nodes."
"to support the management of tabular data. It offers a suite to import, curate, analyse and publish tabular data resources in a collaborative way."
"to support users to access a fully-fledged online training course. Was used to support the ICES course on oceanography in collaboration with the Technical University of Denmark."
About Dismissed Virtual Research Environments
BlueBRIDGE for aquaculture provided aqua-farming companies with the capacities necessary for performance estimation, benchmarking, decision making and strategic investment analysis.
These VREs supported the performance evaluation, benchmarking and decision making process of Greeks aquafarming companies, to improve its profitability and minimise environmental impacts. The VRE enabled Aquaculture aqua farmers to evaluate and optimise their performance in terms of production Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), carry out benchmarking analysis comparing their performance against best practices and the competition, and perform a techno economic investment analysis.
Besides the Aquaculture Companies related VREs above described 3 other VREs were offered within this aquaculture context:
- The Aquaculture Training Lab VRE was conceived to provide its users with a set of aquafarming assessment tools enabling them to perform evaluation growth analysis and techno-economic investment analysis;
- The Strategic Investment analysis and Scientific Planning/Alerting (SIASPA) VRE offered geospatial multi-factor optimization services that supported intelligent identification of locations of interest for investors and stakeholders (from an economic and environmental point of view) seeking optimization of intended investments. Furthermore, the analytics functions that were executed over the existing or candidate aquaculture zones could facilitate scientists seeking areas of environmental importance;
- The Sustainable Blue Economy VRE offered a complete set of tools developed for the Blue Economy community, targeting stakeholders, investors, researchers and others. It offered a set of aquafarming assessment tools enabling them to perform evaluation growth analysis, techno-economic investment analysis and geospatial multi-factor optimization services for intelligent identification of locations of interest for investors and stakeholders (from an economic and environmental point of view) seeking optimization of intended investments.
BlueBRIDGE for Scientific training support allowing scientific training courses to be developed and delivered in a cost-effective way. .
These VREs were conceived to support a number of ICES training courses performed by ICES, the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea in Denmark. These VREs were equipped with the following facilities:
- Workspace: for sharing objects of interest;
- Social networking area: for supporting the discussions among members;
- R Studio as-a-Service: a facility enabling users to access a fully-fledged RStudio® working environment directly from the VRE. This environment is integrated with the rest of VRE\VLab facilities, e.g. it is possible to use files from the workspace and to store new files into the workspace.
