The project MERCES is focused on the restoration of different degraded marine habitats, with the aim of: 1) assessing the potential of different technologies and approaches; 2) quantifying the returns in terms of ecosystems services and their socio-economic impacts; 3) defining the legal-policy and governance frameworks needed to optimize the effectiveness of the different restoration approaches. Specific aims include: a) improving existing, and developing new, restoration actions of degraded marine habitats; b) increasing the adaptation of EU degraded marine habitats to global change; c) enhancing marine ecosystem resilience and services; d) conducting cost-benefit analyses for marine restoration measures; e) creating new industrial targets and opportunities. To achieve these objectives MERCES created a multi-disciplinary consortium with skills in marine ecology, restoration, law, policy and governance, socio-economics, knowledge transfer, dissemination and communication. MERCES will start from the inventory of EU degraded marine habitats (WP1), conduct pilot restoration experiments (WP2, WP3, WP4), assess the effects of restoration on ecosystem services (WP5). The legal, policy and governance outputs will make effective the potential of marine restoration (WP6) and one dedicated WP will assess the socio-economic returns of marine ecosystems’ restoration (WP7). The transfer of knowledge and the links with the industrial stakeholders will be the focus of WP8. The results of MERCES will be disseminated to the widest audience (WP9). The project will be managed through a dedicated management office (WP10). MERCES will contribute to the Blue Growth by: i) improving the EU scientific knowledge on marine restoration, ii) contributing to EU Marine Directives; iii) implementing the Restoration Agenda, iv) enhancing the industrial capacity in this field, v) increasing the competitiveness of EU in the world market of restoration, and vi) offering new employment opportunities.

The main objective of the MyOcean Follow On project will be to operate a rigorous, robust and sustainable Ocean Monitoring and Forecasting component of the pre-operational Copernicus Marine Service delivering ocean physical state and ecosystem information to intermediate and downstream users in the areas of marine safety, marine resources, marine and coastal environment and weather, climate and seasonal forecasting. This is highly consistent with the objective of the HORIZON 2020 Work Programme 2014-2015 establishing the need for interim continuity of the pre-operational services developed by MyOcean 2 before the fully operational services of Copernicus. The project proposes to sustain the current pre-operational marine activities until March 2015 in order to avoid any interruption in the critical handover phase between pre-operational and fully operational services. In effect, any significant interruption in these services could potentially jeopardize several important high-level policy objectives and undermine other related scientific activities. In the period from October 2014 to March 2015, MyOcean-FO will ensure a controlled continuation and extension of the services already implemented in MyOcean and MyOcean2 FP7 projects that have advanced the pre-operational marine service capabilities. To enable the move to full operations, MyOcean-FO is targeting the prototype operations, and developing the management and coordination to continue the provision of Copernicus Marine service products and the link with independent R&D activities. MyOcean-FO will produce and deliver services based upon the common-denominator ocean state variables that are required to help meet the needs for information for environmental and civil security policy making, assessment and implementation. MyOcean-FO is also expected to have a significant impact on the emergence of a technically robust and sustainable Copernicus Service infrastructure in Europe.

The EcoScope project will develop an interoperable platform and a robust decision-making toolbox, available through a single public portal, to promote an efficient, ecosystem-based fisheries management. It will be guided by policy makers and scientific advisory bodies, and address ecosystem degradation and the anthropogenic impact that are causing fisheries to be unsustainably exploited across European Seas. The EcoScope Platform will organise and homogenise climatic, oceanographic, biogeochemical, biological and fisheries datasets for European Seas to a common standard type and format that will be available through interactive mapping layers. The EcoScope Toolbox, a scoring system based on assessments of all ecosystem components, ecosystem and economic models, will operate as a decision-support tool for examining fisheries management and marine policy scenarios and spatial planning simulations. Groups of end-users and stakeholders will be involved in the design, development and operation of both the platform and the toolbox. Novel assessment methods for data-poor fisheries, including non-commercial species, as well as for biodiversity and the conservation status of protected megafauna, will be used to assess the status of all ecosystem components across European Seas and test new technologies for evaluating the environmental, anthropogenic and climatic impact on ecosystems and fisheries. A series of sophisticated capacity building tools (online courses, webinars and games) will be available to stakeholders through the EcoScope Academy. The EcoScope project will provide an effective toolbox to decision makers and end-users that will be adaptive to their capacity, needs and data availability. The toolbox will incorporate methods for dealing with uncertainty; thus, it will promote efficient, holistic, sustainable, ecosystem-based fisheries management that will aid towards restoring fisheries sustainability and ensuring balance between food security and healthy seas.

NAUTILOS will fill in existing marine observation and modelling gaps through the development of a new generation of cost-effective sensors and samplers for physical (salinity, temperature), chemical (inorganic carbon, nutrients, oxygen), and biological (phytoplankton, zooplankton, marine mammals) essential ocean variables, in addition to micro-/nano-plastics, to improve our understanding of environmental change and anthropogenic impacts related to aquaculture, fisheries, and marine litter. Newly developed marine technologies will be integrated with different observing platforms and deployed through the use of novel approaches in a broad range of key environmental settings (e.g. from shore to deep-sea deployments) and EU policy-relevant applications: - Fisheries & Aquaculture Observing Systems, - Platforms of Opportunity demonstrations, - Augmented Observing Systems demonstration, - Demonstrations on ARGO Platform, - Animal-borne Instruments. The fundamental aim of the project will be to complement and expand current European observation tools and services, to obtain a collection of data at a much higher spatial resolution and temporal regularity and length than currently available at the European scale, and to further enable and democratise the monitoring of the marine environment to both traditional and non-traditional data users. The principles that underlie the NAUTILOS project will be those of the development, integration, validation and demonstration of new cutting-edge technologies with regards to sensors, interoperability and embedding skills. The development will always be guided by the objectives of scalability, modularity, cost-effectiveness and open-source availability of software and data products produced. NAUTILOS will also provide full and open data feed towards well-established portals and data integrators (EMODnet, CMEMS, JERICO).

PAPILLONS will elucidate ecological and socioeconomic sustainability of agricultural plastics (APs) in relation to releases and impacts of micro- and nanoplastics (MNPs) in European soils. We will advance knowledge on sources, behaviour and impacts through cross-disciplinary research, bringing together scientists from chemistry, materials engineering, agronomy, soil ecology, toxicology and social sciences. We will transform the scientific knowledge generated into guidance on specific solutions by applying a Multi-actor approach, involving actors in the agricultural and policy sector and world-leading industries. This will enable co-creation of knowledge and provide the scientific background to enable policy, agricultural and industrial innovation towards sustainable farm production systems. We will deliver the first digital European atlas of AP use, management and waste production to estimate sources of MNP to agricultural soils. We will run integrative studies at laboratory, mesocosm and field scales in different parts of Europe to address: occurrence of AP-derived MNPs; MNP behaviour and transport in soil; uptake by biota and crops; long-term impacts on soil properties, fertility and ecological services; effects on biological and functional diversity across multiple scales; effects on plant production and quality; and socioeconomic impacts of AP-based practices. We will focus on multigenerational effect studies for relevant traditional and biodegradable polymers, at realistic and future high-exposure scenarios. PAPILLONS partners pioneered soil MNP research, host the majority of European analytical capacity for assessing soil contamination and will provide validated, high-throughput analysis for MNPs in soil. Using innovative applications of state-of-the-art analytical chemistry, we will advance analysis down to the nanoscale range and develop novel radiolabelled nanoplastics for accurately tracking behaviour and transport in soil and uptake by biota and crops.