Preliminary report on progress for advanced data processing, geolocation and export format

Grant Agreement: 101082021
Project Acronym: MARCO-BOLO 
Project Title: MARCO-BOLO will strengthen European marine, coastal and freshwater biodiversity observation to understand and restore ocean health.
Deliverable Number: D4.1
Work Package Number: WP4
Deliverable Title: Preliminary report on progress for advanced data processing, geolocation and export format

Sustainable monitoring of organisms and their habitats is imperative during the biodiversity crisis, and is especially important in marine waters where fisheries alone feed approximately 3 billion people globally while multiple threats change ecosystem dynamics. MARCO BOLO’s WP4 aims to create a direct pipeline from non-invasive, in situ monitoring of marine life, to ocean users and managers. WP4 aims to achieve this through adoption of workflows developed in WP1, FAIR data reporting, automated classification of high-volume datasets, and geolocation of sensed data in nearreal-time. The first 18 months of MARCO BOLO resulted in the development of several new deployable technologies to measure biodiversity, enabling geolocation in the field, simplicity in interacting with the software and datasets, automated classification and data processing, and enabling data flows from high-volume datasets to public repositories. While not yet field-tested, the developments described here already enable the reporting of biodiversity datasets for mapping and response, detecting ecosystems and their prey, and counting and communicating species data from the field. One publication describing these new biodiversity systems is open-access and another has been submitted. The WP4 team aims to demonstrate these developments in June, 2025 in the Belgian North Sea. This report describes the progress made in the first 18 months of MARCO BOLO WP4, Task 4.1, to “develop autonomous systems to deliver georeferenced maps of biodiversity attributes including genomic, taxonomic and habitat characteristics."