Zoekresultaten

Queer as the Ocean

Queer as the Ocean, already showcased at the Warming Up festival and Society 5.0 in 2023.

Digital Twins of the ocean : autogenerated 3D environments for validating offshore wind farm operations.

Within the context of the Iliad project, the authors present technical challenges and the first results of having valid 3D scenes of (non-)existing offshore wind farms procedurally and automatically generated within either the Unreal or Unity game engine. The Iliad – Digital Twins of the Ocean project (EU Horizon 2020) aims to develop a ‘system of systems’ for creating cutting-edge digital twins of specific sea and ocean areas for diverse purposes related to their sustainable use and protection. One of the Iliad pilots addresses the topic of offshore floating wind farm construction or maintenance scenario testing and validation using the Unity 3D game engine. This work will speed up the development of these scenarios by procedurally and automatically creating the Unity 3D scene rather than manually (which is done at present). The main technical challenges concern the data-driven approach, in which a JSON configuration file drives the scene creation. The first results show a base wind farm running in Unreal 5.1. The final product will be able to handle environmental conditions, biological conditions, and specific human activities as input parameters.

Iliad Digital Twins of the Ocean: an innovative approach to Marine Data Systems or: How we build a digital ocean twin with our ocean observatory.

Marine spatial planning in regional ocean areas

Marine spatial planning (MSP) was developed as a place-based, integrated marine governance approach to address sectoral and fragmented management issues and has seen significant evolvement over the past two decades. MSP has rapidly become the most commonly endorsed management regime for sustainable development in the marine environment, with initiatives being implemented across multiple regions of the globe. Despite its broad and growing acceptance and use, there are several key challenges that remain, both conceptual and practical, that are negatively impacting the realization of MSP’s potential. These include institutional shortcomings, the exclusion of stakeholders, a failure to account for the human and social dimensions of marine regions, the marginalization of different types of knowledge, and the growing need to adapt to global environmental change. Although studies have examined the emergence of MSP in different geographical and institutional contexts, there is a lack of comparative analysis of how initiatives are progressing and if the foundational aims of MSP are being achieved. There is a need to analyze the degree to which MSP initiatives are responding to the environmental challenges that they have been set up to tackle and, as marine plans are setting out long-term visions for marine management, to understand if current initiatives are fit for purpose. This article responds to these concerns and reviews the evolution of MSP within 12 regional ocean areas. We utilize the term regional ocean areas to illustrate the geographical spread of MSP, with examinations conducted of the approach to MSP that specific nations within each of the 12 chosen clusters have followed. By critically assessing how MSP is progressing, it is possible to shed light on the opportunities and challenges that are facing current initiatives. This can help to reveal learning lessons that can inform future MSP systems and guide initiatives along more sustainable pathways.

A Rising Ocean

This is a report of the research done during the Summer School 2022 at the Digital Methods Initiative (UvA). The work and the report were developed in collaboration with the participants in the datasprint: Gabrielle Aguilar // Federica Bardelli // Laura Bruschi // Miranda García // Giulia Giorgi // Matthew Hanchard // Bakar Abdul-Rashid Jeduah // Natalie Kerby // Goran Kusić // Bruno Mattos // Samir van Oeijen Rodríguez // Alessandro Quets // Eivind Røssaak // Miazia Schueler // Zijing Xu // Xin Zhou // Chloe Sussan-Molson // Maud Borie // Alireza Hashemzadegan // Misha Velthuis. Abstract:Sea-level rise has long been one of the most locally tangible impacts of climate change, both now and in the future. Due to accelerating climate change, the annual rate of sea-level rise has almost tripled over the last century, and the mean sea level rise is expected to rise 0.3m-1.0m by 2100 (Duijndam et al., 2021). The IPCC states that risks include increased flooding, erosion, loss of ecosystems and permanent submergence (Oppenheimer et al., 2019). In the UK, there are fierce debates over whether to protect or surrender coastal homes threatened by sea-level rise (Fisher, 2022), while in the Netherlands the trust in its strong water management and engineering tradition has led to the so-called myth of the dry feet—the idea that sea-level rise in the Netherlands, a country that in part lies below sea-level, can be countered by merely building higher dams (Schuttenhelm, 2020). Scenarios for the future of the Netherlands include new adaptation strategies of living with the water, in which parts of the land are given back to nature to preserve larger cities (Deltares, 2019). Globally, some of the world’s most populous cities, such as New York, Bangkok and Shanghai are amongst the most vulnerable (C40 Cities, 2018), while the existential threats to small islands such as Kiribati, Seychelles and the Maldives could result in entire states disappearing from the world (Martyr-Koller et al., 2021). Emblematic images of people wading through the flooded streets of Venice holding up their shopping bags or stopping for a coffee travelled the news and social media outlets as an illustration of the climate crisis, and the collision of rising sea levels, a sinking city, surging seasonal winds and failing governance as the city experienced its worst floods in 50 years (National Geographic, 2019).There have been some notable efforts to visualise scientific projections of sea-level rise (e.g. Climate Central, 2015), as well as more creative attempts to communicate the threat such as the iconic Der Spiegel depicting a submerged Koln Cathedral (Mahony, 2016). Yet it is argued that sea-level rise remains a relatively low public concern given the huge potential risks to ecosystems and human habitats (Akerlof et al., 2017), while a recent advanced review of digital media research on climate communication found no research focused on the issue (Pearce et al., 2019). In this project, we will try to fill this gap, looking to see how both present and future sea-level rise is being imagined and interpreted on social media platforms, in terms of textual and visual content, information sources, locations, and point in time (i.e., future or present).

A Digital Twin of the Trondheim Fjord for Environmental Monitoring : A Pilot Case

Digital Twins of the Ocean (DTO) are a rapidly emerging topic that has attracted significant interest from scientists in recent years. The initiative, strongly driven by the EU, aims to create a digital replica of the ocean to better understand and manage marine environments. The Iliad project, funded under the EU Green Deal call, is developing a framework to support multiple interoperable DTO using a federated systems-of-systems approach across various fields of applications and ocean areas, called pilots. This paper presents the results of a Water Quality DTO pilot located in the Trondheim fjord in Norway. This paper details the building blocks of DTO, specific to this environmental monitoring pilot. A crucial aspect of any DTO is data, which can be sourced internally, externally, or through a hybrid approach utilizing both. To realistically twin ocean processes, the Water Quality pilot acquires data from both surface and benthic observatories, as well as from mobile sensor platforms for on-demand data collection. Data ingested into an InfluxDB are made available to users via an API or an interface for interacting with the DTO and setting up alerts or events to support ’what-if’ scenarios. Grafana, an interactive visualization application, is used to visualize and interact with not only time-series data but also more complex data such as video streams, maps, and embedded applications. An additional visualization approach leverages game technology based on Unity and Cesium, utilizing their advanced rendering capabilities and physical computations to integrate and dynamically render real-time data from the pilot and diverse sources. This paper includes two case studies that illustrate the use of particle sensors to detect microplastics and monitor algae blooms in the fjord. Numerical models for particle fate and transport, OpenDrift and DREAM, are used to forecast the evolution of these events, simulating the distribution of observed plankton and microplastics during the forecasting period.