WP5

Sound knowledge and understanding of the ocean, a critical component of the Earth systems, is essential to mitigate human impacts on the global environment and to promote the ocean’s sustainable use and blue economy. Effective ocean management depends on marine observations, generated by existing national or regional ocean observing systems and networks, increasingly relevant to a broad array of policymakers and stakeholders, including industry. In the last two decades, significant investment in ocean observing infrastructures has been made by European nations and the EC. Environmental RIs have been established to share facilities, resources and services to been made by European nations and the EC. Environmental RIs have been established to share facilities, resources and services to monitor the environment and secure their long-lasting sustainability and becoming essential component of the European contribution to the global ocean observation system. Italy is actively involved, promoting and leading some component parts of PNIR high and medium priority marine RIs a to contribute to the European strategy for ocean observation and to the ESFRI roadmap. RIs ensure robust quality control scientific data, but each has its own strategy and development plan as well as its own rules for access data and services. The harmonization of the national contribution to the marine RIs will result in a great advantage for Italy sharing expertise and data. As highlighted by the Italian Oceanographic Commission (COI), national body of UNESCO Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, it is mandatory to implement a unique portal where all the Italian marine monitoring systems and the modelling results are displayed and all the marine data can be visible and easily accessible.

The WP will integrate all marine relevant RIs with the aim to guarantee access to Italian facilities, services and marine data, to ensure long term monitoring of EOVs, EBVs and ECVs. This will allow the establishment of a national integrated marine observing system able to contribute to European and International effort on ocean observations (EOOS and GOOS), responding to the major challenge of UN Ocean Decade of Science for Sustainable Development. The Italian Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) proposed by this WP seeks to coordinate national observations to improve quality and interoperability of ocean data (including freshwater river outflow) for three critical themes: climate, operational services, and marine ecosystem health. We propose to build IOOS by incorporating and scaling-up existing ocean observing capabilities via integration and harmonization of observations carried out by RIs. The involved RIs will be DANUBIUS, eLTER, EMSO ERIC, EUROARGO,

EUROFLEETS, ICOS ERIC, JERICO, Laboratori Nazionali del Sud, N/R Laura Bassi, SIOS, GeoSciences. In the process towards the creation of IOOS, WP5 will benefit from the international experiences and lessons learned and on the workdone by COI, in designing an integrated observing system as Italian contribution to GOOS (Global Ocean Observing System).