MARCO-BOLO 1st Community of Practice Event (M10) & 1st Co-Design Workshop Report

This report summarizes the first Community of Practice (CoP) event celebrated jointly with the first co-design/co-creation workshop on 23 May 2024. 

The title of the event was “Making Marine and Coastal Biodiversity Observations Policy Relevant”. It was attended by more than 70 biodiversity or marine data experts and other stakeholders from research centers, European, national, regional and international organizations.

The event consisted of a series of presentations from European Commission representatives (DG ENV, DG MARE, DG RTD, JRC) and Regional Sea Conventions (HELCOM and OSPAR) who presented their views and requirements on the biodiversity monitoring and data flow to better report to EU and global policies. Seagrass cover and composition was presented by a representative of GOOS BioEco panel as a use case to illustrate the importance of the alignment of data flows from regional to global levels and the of Essential Ocean Variables (EOV) concept to harmonize and improve ocean observations. In the last part of the workshop, different MARCO-BOLO experts presented their current work on the development of biodiversity products in order to initiate the process of a better co-design with stakeholders. Special attention was given to the MARCO-BOLO Data Management plan and its potential use by the biodiversity data community.