SURIMI

Background and Objectives

Developing the European Digital Twin of the Ocean (DTO) is a core target of the EU Mission “Restore our Ocean and Waters by 2030”. It aims to model the Ocean's multiple components, provide knowledge and understanding of the past and present, and create trustable predictions of its future behaviour. 

SURIMI will contribute to the development of the DTO by developing the SURIMI toolbox, which will include a set of socio-ecological models, the data to inform them, an interoperability layer to connect them to each other and the DTO, and a graphical user interface to make them accessible and allow users to run customised analyses and what-if scenarios. The whole toolbox will be integrated within the DTO infrastructure. 

The common interoperability layer lies at the core of the toolbox and will be specifically engineered to integrate ecological and socio-economic models in a “plug-and-play” fashion, easily usable by other DTO projects and components that require ecological and socio-economic layers in their analysis. Moreover, SURIMI will combine its models and data to operate a management-strategy evaluation decision-support tool. This simulator will analyse the impact of novel policies and scenarios on both society and the environment.

The graphical user interface will have two components to improve accessibility and promote usage: The first one will focus on data visualization, bringing together SURIMI’s social, ecological, biological and economic data, collected at different scales and resolution, under a single interface. The second one will be a management strategy evaluation decision support tool, that will allow users to pick scenarios, define geographical boundaries, and incorporate supplementary data and expert knowledge. The outputs will be concise and easy to understand. They will also present the uncertainty of the results, and will include socio-ecological indicators developed within the SURIMI project. To enhance user-friendliness SURIMI will also incorporate Natural Language Processing and text-based Artificial Intelligence transformers, which will allow users to analyse and manipulate the models using a purely text-based interface, as well as to obtain results as a text.

European Marine Board role

EMB is the leader of WP1 on Co-creation, stakeholder engagement, dissemination, exploitation, and communication. EMB's main role is to ensure that the SURIMI toolbox is co-designed with relevant stakeholders so that their needs are met. To this end, we will organise three stakeholder workshops and a survey. EMB will also lead the task of stakeholder mapping and setting up a Stakeholder Forum.

Contact at European Marine Board Secretariat: Ana Rodriguez