Why

In EMODnet already more than 160 marine and oceanographic data repositories and data management experts from public, research and private organisations in Europe work together to assemble marine data for the European seas and coastal waters from diverse sources and resources in order to make them more accessible and more interoperable. Part of their work involves arranging long term stewardship and access of the datasets through dedicated data repositories as well as creating products of society use such as digital terrain models or sediment maps based on the available datasets.

These data and data products are very important for research, but also for monitoring, predicting and managing the marine environment, assessing fish stocks and biodiversity, offshore industry, maritime industry, offshore controling any hazard or disaster, and tourist industry. They support also the execution of international protocols, conventions and agreements, which have been signed by coastal states for protection of the seas.

Together the EMODnet data repositories already manage datasets on a regular basis from more than a thousand data originators from public, research and private sectors that collect oceanographic and marine data through a broad, multidisciplinary spectrum of projects and programmes.

However, still many data collected by public authorities, researchers and private operators of coastal or offshore facilities do not arrive to the national or regional repositories and are thus unavailable to scientists and engineers for further purposes.

This creates additional costs for those working on marine issues who will have the choice of accepting lower confidence in their analysis than would otherwise be the case, or being compelled to needlessly repeat observations.

Additional data providers can therefore contribute to increasing productivity of those working on marine issues, stimulating innovation in the blue economy and reducing uncertainty in our knowledge of the behaviour of the sea.

Most probably one or more of these benefits are also applicable to the data providers themselves. Moreover data providers will be publicly acknowledged for their contributions through the EMODnet Data Ingestion portal by means of metadata and data citations.