The Horizon Europe “MARCO-BOLO” project (December 2022 – November 2026) aims to structure and strengthen European coastal and marine biodiversity observation capabilities, linking them to global efforts to understand and restore ocean health, hence ensuring that outputs respond to explicit stakeholder needs from policy, planning and industry. To this end, MARCO-BOLO will establish and engage with a Community of Practice to determine end-user needs with the aim of optimising marine data flows, knowledge uptake, and improving governance based on biodiversity observations. By exploiting synergies with concurrent projects, it will develop and demonstrate new autonomous technology for biodiversity mapping and monitoring, and data streams from remote sensing, eDNA, robotics, optical and acoustic observations.

The Horizon Europe eDNAqua-Plan project (A Plan towards an eDNA reference library and data repository for Aquatic Organisms, navigating Europe towards the next generation biodiversity monitoring) (January 2023 – December 2025) is led by an interdisciplinary consortium comprising 18 partner institutions from 11 countries, and one international (UN) institute, with complementary expertise in marine and freshwater monitoring, eDNA analysis as well as data science. The consortium cooperates with the large EU research projects and infrastructure such as EMODnet, BIOSCAN-Europe, the Ocean and Water knowledge system, LifeWatch, and international systems (ELIXIR/EBI and OBIS), amongst others, to maximise synergies and interoperability internationally. Possible implementation will be demonstrated by use cases from national and transnational water monitoring programs.

The Horizon Europe OceanICU (“Improving Carbon Understanding”) project (December 2022 – November 2027) will produce new data, information and understanding on the role of the ocean in the global carbon cycle. It will explore the role of key organisms across basin scales and quantify the past, current and future state of the ocean C cycle, with a particular focus on the BCP. It will also use the understanding developed on key organisms to give us increased predictability of the ocean carbon cycle, particularly around the role of marine pelagic and benthic invertebrate and vertebrate C.

The ambition of the Horizon 2020 “AtlantECO” project (September 2020 – August 2024) is to develop and apply a novel, unifying framework for providing knowledge-based resources to design policies, support decision making and engage with citizens to encourage responsible behaviour to manage the Atlantic system and protect its provision of Ecosystem Services. The project aims to determine the structure and function of Atlantic microbiome in the context of ocean circulation and presence of pollutants, e.g., plastics, to assess its role in driving the dynamics of Atlantic ecosystems at basin and regional scales; its potential of being used as a sensor of ecosystem state and the mechanisms by which it drives the provision of 5 ecosystem services.

Horizon 2020 Mission Atlantic (September 2020 – August 2026) is an EU-funded project that will map and assess the present and future status of Atlantic marine ecosystems under the influence of climate change and exploitation. Sustainably managing ocean resources is linked to our ability to assess and predict drivers of change, and the subsequent impact on marine ecosystems. These are extremely variable, subject to large uncertainties, with complex interconnectivities. Addressing these challenges, Mission Atlantic will support managers and policy makers to balance the need for environmental protection with sustainable development, and provide the necessary science to develop a novel narrative to secure a positive future for the Atlantic Ocean.