The European Union, under the Horizon 2020 programme, has granted €2 million to provide information services that offer high resolution water quality and met-ocean indicators in coastal and nearshore areas.
The FORCOAST (Earth Observation Services for Wild Fisheries, Oysterground Restoration and Bivalve Mariculture along European Coasts) project’s goal is to improve operation, planning and management of different marine activities in the aquaculture sector.
In this way FORCOAST is actually zooming in on the work that is done in another European project HiSea, but including other regional seas, and incorporating different requirements and bottlenecks for implementation.
The H2020-funded FORCOAST project takes a step in this direction by bringing the coastal water quality and met-ocean information closer to the users.
The information and services will be co-designed with stakeholders, thereby ensuring that these are tailored to meet their needs.
FORCOAST will develop, test and demonstrate novel operational Copernicus-based downstream information services by incorporating Copernicus Marine, Land and Climate Services Products, local monitoring data and advanced modelling in the service.
Furthermore, FORCOAST will make use of on of the DIAS (Data and Information Access Services) which will help to develop the data access and cloud processing service.
The provided services will be applied in eight pilot sites covering five different European coastal areas.
The outcome of FORCOAST is therefore a novel commercial service platform that will provide Copernicus-based downstream information of coastal services to a variety of stakeholders.