The biodiversity, health and services of European marine ecosystems is severely threatened as cumulative human pressures and impacts continue to spread and increase throughout our seas and along our coasts. In order to put biodiversity on the path to recovery and thus achieve the ambitious policy goals set out by the EU Green Deal and the Biodiversity Strategy 2030, we need well informed science advice and operational decision-support tools allowing end-users to decide on conservation actions for biodiversity protection (e.g., MPAs), while at the same time seek to minimize trade-offs with other human use of ocean space (e.g., fishing, off shore energy and shipping). B-USEFUL will develop and deliver user-oriented solutions fit for uptake and implementation in decision making by effectively building upon existing European data infrastructures and governance frameworks for ecosystem-based management advice and marine spatial planning. This will be achieved by delivering upon the following objectives (here presented in short form) addressing the expected outcomes and impacts of the call and destination, namely to: (i) identify end-user needs; (ii) co-develop biodiversity indicators, targets and scenarios; (iii) create a standardized biodiversity and pressure data base; (iv) assess the status and cumulative impacts on biodiversity; (v) quantify risk and vulnerability to biodiversity loss; (vi) perform model forecasts of changes in biodiversity and ecosystem services; (vii) co-develop an interactive, online decision-support tool fit for management strategy evaluation of actions ensuring biodiversity protection. The project will embrace a process of co-creation where all outputs are iteratively co-developed, validated and approved by end-users. This serves not only to build mutual trust and credibility, but also facilitate direct uptake and implementation of the user-oriented tools and knowledge within operational decision-making for marine management and conservation.

SEAwise will address the key challenge preventing implementation of a fully operational European Ecosystem Based Fisheries Management: the need to increase fisheries benefits while reducing ecosystem impact under environmental change and increasing competition for space. The SEAwise network of stakeholders, advisory bodies and scientists will co-design key priorities and approaches to provide an open knowledge base on European Social-Ecological Fisheries Systems. SEAwise will innovate the prediction of social indicators of small-scale fisheries, coastal communities, carbon footprint and human health benefits. Using these indicators in fisheries models will help give advice on economically effective and socially acceptable governance under climate change, productivity changes, and the landing obligation. SEAwise will link the first ecosystem-scale assessment of maritime activities’ impacts on habitats with the fish stocks they support. Using ecosystem effects on fishing, including environmental metrics, density dependence, predation, stock health indicators and habitat extent will improve stock productivity predictions. Estimating effects of fishing on sensitive species, benthic habitats, food webs, biodiversity and litter allows evaluation of the mutual consistency of objectives for ecological and social systems. Multispecies-multifleet models will provide ecosystem forecasts of the effect of fisheries management measures. SEAwise will identify the simplest possible combination of management measures and investigate portfolio diversification as an approach for managing ecosystem resilience and climate adaptation. SEAwise tools and courses for ICES, GFCM, stakeholders and decision makers will ensure that these methods can be used directly in Mediterranean, western European, North Sea and Baltic Sea waters. The predictions will inform an online advice tool highlighting stock- and fisheries-specific social and ecological effects and management trade-offs.

The overall goal of MEESO is to quantify the spatio-temporal distributions of biomass, production and ecosystem role of mesopelagic resources and to assess options to sustainably manage and govern their exploitation. To reach this goal, MEESO will create new knowledge and data on the mesopelagic community, its biodiversity, drivers of its biomass, its role in carbon sequestration, its role in the oceanic ecosystem and its interactions with the epipelagic community which includes several important commercial fish stocks. Besides applying state of the art experimental and quantitative methods, MEESO will develop and implement new acoustic and trawling technologies necessary for the knowledge and data generation in relation to this largely unknown and remote part of marine ecosystems. MEESO includes a significant amount of in-kind financing for technology development and scientific surveys. MEESO will apply the new knowledge and data to determine the potential of the mesopelagic biomass to be sustainably exploited for products included in the human food chain. For the first time combining leading experts in science, engineering, fisheries and governance, MEESO will develop commercial fishing and processing technologies and mapping of contaminant and nutrient contents to explore the basis for a viable fishery and creation of jobs. Mesopelagic organisms represent one of the largest unexploited resource left in the world's oceans, with a recent biomass estimate at 10 billion metric tons. The new tools and technologies, as well as assessment and management roadmaps, developed in MEESO will establish the trade-offs between exploitation, sustainability and viability of the resource, and identify options for its governance.

The ocean and its biodiversity are essential to life on this planet. Comprehensive data on biodiversity, and related human and environmental pressures are crucial to understand its current state and how this may change. Protecting and restoring biodiversity is one of three objectives of the Horizon Europe Mission to restore our oceans and waters by 2030, enabling the EU to reach its Green Deal and Biodiversity 2030 targets. Identified as one of the Mission "enablers", the EU will build on “a digital knowledge system” to include a Digital Twin of the Ocean (DTO) allowing simulation of ‘what if’ scenarios, advancing ocean knowledge, informing evidence-based policy and offering a range of societal applications. To effectively replicate the ocean’s ecology, the DTO requires sustained flows of data on biodiversity and associated pressures. Despite myriad actors collecting biodiversity data, and the development of novel cost-effective monitoring technologies, much of these data are inaccessible or unusable for a variety of reasons, hampering the development of the DTO biological component and limiting its efficacy. DTO-BioFlow will activate access to ("sleeping") marine biodiversity data and enable the sustainable integration of existing and new Artificial Intelligence processed and automated data flows from various sources to EMODnet and into the EDITO infrastructure serving the EU DTO. Combining sustained data flows, models and new algorithms, DTO-BioFlow will develop and integrate the biological component of the DTO, including new digital tools and services. Policy-relevant use cases, will demonstrate the benefit for marine ecosystems of continuous data streams flowing through EMODnet and usable by the EU DTO infrastructures and ultimate end-users. Mobilising the marine biodiversity community towards increasing the availability of biodiversity monitoring data into 2030, DTO-BioFlow and its outputs will support the Mission’s actions to protect and restore biodiversity.