OCEAN THEMATIC LINE
The ocean constitutes one of the main resources of food, employment, and economic revenue, and is an immense source of virtually untapped living and non-living resources and sustainable energy. The ocean is also a “source of solutions for climate change mitigation and for many dimensions of a sustainable ocean economy”. However, the oceans remain largely unknown and consequently unexploited. Considerable work remains to be done to have a synoptic view and to forecast the capacity of the open sea and the deep oceans over extended areas of interest in order to better understand its impact on the climate and to exploit the resources available in a safe and sustainable manner. This will require the development of a new breed of methods and tools for ocean modeling, exploration, and exploitation and the establishment of strong cooperative links between universities, research institutes, commercial companies, and stakeholders to meet the above goals. It is against this backdrop of ideas that in this thematic line we aim to merge scientific knowledge and technological developments with a view to answer the manifold challenges of Ocean Modeling, Exploration, and Exploitation and to take hold of the new research and business opportunities that these activities bring along.
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The following topics are at the core of the activities carried out in the OCEANS Thematic Line: i) ocean modeling to simulate and forecast physical and biogeochemical tridimensional processes in coastal and open waters at different scales, as well as estuaries and watersheds, using an integrated modeling philosophy, ii) remote sensing as a tool to monitor the state of the ocean, including the mapping and measurement of anthropogenic noise in the water column, iii) cooperative marine/aerial robotics networked via multimodal wireless communication systems consisting of hybrid acoustic and optical systems to afford scientific and commercial end-users the tools required to sample the ocean adaptively, inspect critical offshore structures for ocean farming and energy harvesting, map vast extensions of the deep ocean, monitor marine protected areas, and secure harbor installations, and iv) specialized sensor networks to better understand migratory routes and movements of marine megafauna in selected areas using bio-tagging devices, and v) Ocean Literacy actions in the scope of the national program “Blue School”, promoted under the Minister of the Sea.
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