These digital twins of the ocean (DOTs) will combine digital twins of the ocean with human activities in the ocean, and combine socio-ecological and socio-economic data with ocean data, ecosystem data, and a variety of models.
Demonstrating applications in the Norwegian North Sea, the German North Sea and the Baltic Sea, SEADOTs addresses current challenges and developments, simulating the intricate interactions between human activities and marine ecosystems. This facilitates informed political decision-making, marine spatial planning, and adaptive management. SEADOTs aspires to safeguard ocean ecosystems, promote sustainable resource use, and enhance social and economic well-being.
The ocean offers numerous opportunities, including recreation, tourism, food production, energy, and transportation. Concurrently, it faces substantial challenges such as climate change, pollution, and overfishing. These challenges demand a holistic approach to effective management that is sustainable for both the environment and communities.
Digital Ocean Twins (DTOs) utilise existing ocean data and incorporate predictive models, often leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence to manage large datasets to integrate representations of the ocean with models of human activities in maritime sectors such as marine industries, tourism, and transport. In SEADOTs, we aim to bring social-ecological data into DOTs to support more holistic decision-making for planning and management of coastal areas.
Beyond project coordination, SINTEF Ocean is leading the development of models that simulate the interactions between social, ecological, and economic factors in ocean ecosystems, creating indicators to measure ecological and socio-economic aspects. SINTEF Ocean is also leading the development of lightweight web applications for collecting micro-social data for the demonstrator cases, which will feed into digital ocean twins. Additionally, SINTEF Ocean is leading one demonstrator case located in Utsira municipality.