Today starts the kick-off meeting for the MARBEFES Horizons Project in Sopot, Poland! From the 4th to the 6th of October, MARBEFES will be presented, a 4-year Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Action project coordinated by the INSTYTUT OCEANOLOGII POLSKIEJ AKADEMII NAUK (IO PAN). A group of highly skilled partners from 15 different countries are attending the meeting, including ARIES’ lead investigator, Ferdinando Villa, and marine researcher and head of MARBEFES project at ARIES, Marta Pascual.
MARBEFES, which stands for MARine Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning leading to Ecosystem Services, will be the central theme of the meeting as it connects marine biodiversity, its ecological structure, and its functioning to ecological and economic assessment. The attending partners will also explain the objectives and expected outcomes of this project, in addition to an overview of the other-funded Horizon Europe marine projects.
Besides MARBEFES, the three-day event will also revolve around stakeholder involvement and outreach partners, as well as project partners’ involvement and relations/interactions between work packages. There are also several detailed discussions planned about how to optimise each partner’s involvement in the project, the planning of Broad Belt Transect (BBT) actions, and future next steps.
The ARIES team, as an integrated modelling platform, joined the project on the 1st of September to provide spatial-temporal analysis of changes in coastal and marine natural capital and ecosystem services in the hopes of spreading its AI method for mapping, evaluating, and visualising European marine natural capital in a global context.
Stay tuned for more updates on the kick-off and the future of ARIES in marine-related work!
