Research Area 3: Emerging Technologies Enabling Advanced Marine Science
Innovative technologies are capable of not only facilitating science, but also accelerating and improving it, representing a science field on their own. New opportunities to link different data sets, the significantly growing computational resources, innovative molecular biological approaches or the use of machine learning or artificial intelligence to analyse huge amounts of data, demonstrate that research in methodology and technology will in the future create an enormous benefit for environmental science. The IOW will support this strategy of embracing the potential of innovative technologies to foster science and support the societal transformation towards sustainability with the new research area “Emerging Technologies Enabling Advanced Marine Science”. Two overarching topics will be targeted in a combined effort of several disciplines. These are (1) to develop and improve robust autonomous measuring and sampling devices for the highly dynamic near-shore area and (2) to build up a Digital Twin of the Baltic Sea. For more details see Box 3.
Robust autonomous measuring and sampling systems for the highly dynamic near-shore area
Measurement and sampling requirements are diverse, ranging from a traditional CTD setup to geochemical variables, autonomous phytoplankton detection, sampling methods for molecular biological analyses or sediment acoustics. The dynamic shallow coastal area, a new regional focus of our research, requires specific technological advances to capture the temporal and spatial variability with adaptive and autonomously operating systems.
A Digital Twin of the Baltic Sea
The increasing volume and complexity of scientific data calls for new strategies and approaches for data acquisition, processing, storage, analysis, and re-use. Integrating the abundance of observational information with coupled numerical models, together with advanced model and visualization techniques, will provide unprecedented realism in future simulations. With such a "Digital Twin of the Baltic Sea" we will investigate the response of the system to various influences and provide a means of interaction with societal actors.
Box 3: Research area (RA) 3 emphasises on topics requiring concerted multidisciplinary efforts.
In general, we will follow three research lines: New observation technologies, scientific model development and data integration. Research in this area is envisaged to be tightly accompanied by the adaptation and further development of our infrastructure to create the significant push forward, which is needed to fully exploit the new opportunities and meet the challenges of the future.