Exerted pressures on the ocean and more particularly on the coastal and shelf seas increasingly disturb increasingly disturb coastal regions and ecosystems, and will strongly impact our future. To improve the understanding of underlying processes, the series of EU-funded JERICO (Joint European Research Infrastructure of Coastal Observatories) projects have consisted, since 2007, in continuously improving observations in European coastal marine areas where most of the world population lives, with the objective to build a pan-European Research Infrastructure (RI) providing high-quality marine data, expertise, services, facilities and observation systems. The data produced in this long-term framework are multidisciplinary, standardized, quality-controlled, sustained, interoperable, and free for access and use. However, to better serve the scientific community and address societal and policy needs, JERICO has to progress towards a structured operational European RI supported by the EU Member States (and associate

The Co-ReSyF project will implement a dedicated data access and processing infrastructure, with automated tools, methods and standards to support research applications using Earth Observation (EO) data for monitoring of Coastal Waters, leveraging on the components deployed SenSyF. The main objective is to facilitate the access to Earth Observation data and pre-processing tools to the research community, towards the future provision of future Coastal Waters services based on EO data. Through Co-ReSyF‘s collaborative front end, even young and/or inexperienced researchers in EO will be able to upload their applications to the system to compose and configure processing chains for easy deployment on the cloud infrastructure. They will be able to accelerate the development of high-performing applications taking full advantage of the scalability of resources available in the cloud framework. The included facilities and tools, optimized for distributed processing, include EO data access catalogue, discovery and retrieval tools, as well as a number of pre-processing and toolboxes for manipulating EO data. Advanced users will also be able to go further and take full control of the processing chains and algorithms by having access to the cloud back-end and to further optimize their applications for fast deployment for big data access and processing. The Co-ReSyF capabilities will be supported and initially demonstrated by a series of early adopters that will develop new research applications on the coastal domain, will guide the definition of requirements and serve as system beta testers. A competitive call will be issued within the project to further demonstrate and promote the usage of the Co-ReSyF release. These pioneering researchers in will be given access not only to the platform itself, but also to extensive training material on the system and also on Coastal Waters research themes, as well as to the project's events, including the Summer School and Final Workshop.

AQUARIUS will provide a highly comprehensive suite of integrated research infrastructures appropriate to addressing significant challenges for the long-term sustainability of our unique oceans, seas and freshwater ecosystems. For the first time, diverse research infrastructures will be combined to facilitate the work of researchers and key stakeholders focused on challenges and opportunities for both marine and freshwater systems. An impressive range of 57 research infrastructure services will be made available to include research vessels, mobile marine observation platforms, aircraft, drones, satellite, sensors, fixed freshwater and marine observatories and test sites, experimental facilities, and sophisticated data infrastructures. AQUARIUS will support the development phase of the EU Mission to Restore our Ocean and waters by 2030, the Sustainable Blue Economy Partnership, the European Green Deal, and international climate initiatives. It will also be an essential component in achieving the European Digital Twin of the Ocean and the UN Decade for Ocean Sciences. The needs of researchers will be met through a robust and transparent system of transnational access funding Calls, facilitated by centralised user-friendly access portal. The Call programme will be informed through stakeholder engagement and brokerage events. Projects to be selected for Access must convincingly integrate multiple infrastructures and contribute to the core policy objectives of Mission Ocean, that is, to protect and restore marine and freshwater ecosystems and biodiversity; to prevent and eliminate pollution of our oceans, seas and waters; and to ensure a sustainable, carbon-neutral and circular blue economy. A thematic and geographic focus will be the hallmark of the proposed transnational Calls, aligning with the Lighthouse Regions, that is, the Baltic and the North Sea Basins, Black Sea, Atlantic/Arctic, and Mediterranean Sea along with their associated rivers.

4S will address a current data and solution gaps from coastal and offshore stakeholders, which are the ability to generate and access spatial and recent information on seabed, such as benthic habitat, morphology, depth and change and trends. Digital information on these are crucial to respond to EC maritime directive, environmental impact studies and engineering offshore activities. We will address this gap by developing an online, cloud based software, named 4S – Satellite Seafloor Survey Suite – which empowers the users to benefit from satellite capabilities and specific aquatic EO algorithms. 4S Suite will have APIs allowing to integrate it into hydrographic software and user’s workflows, as will developed and demonstrated. 4S will harness Copernicus data together with US satellite lidar data and – optionally – integrate client airborne (drone) imagery and on-site data. The underlying algorithms, which will reach highest TRL level during the project duration, will address aspects of physical modelling, machine learning and sensor fusion procedures and will introduce breakthroughs of the current state of the art. Both, algorithm innovations and the webapp, will be jointly designed and evaluated with the users, of which some are part of the project team. Other stakeholders, many of which have signed supporting letters, will participate in 7 use cases which cover four countries, the Caribbean and several selected sites globally. With this intense evaluation and co-design we will achieve a reliable evaluation of the process and global outreach to the offshore and coastal stakeholders. The development of a sustainable business based on 4S will be driven by the industry partners, which contribute with 52% of the workload. Based on the existing solution gap we expect a continuous and strong increase in the user uptake and thus economic sustainability, which will lead to the growth of the European blue economy and, as social benefit, directly respond to the UNSDG 14.