Marine environmental data applications for blue economy decision support

Marine environments play a central role in the blue economy, providing essential services such as food, coastal protection, tourism, carbon storage, or transportation. However, the marine system is under increasing pressure from over-exploitation, pollution, and climate change. Effective management of marine natural resources and man-made assets is pivotal to support both healthy ocean and coastal systems, and a sustainable blue economy.

Effective management must go beyond short-term sectoral efficiency and actively drive the transition toward regenerative, resilient, and nature-positive ocean and coastal systems, delivering co-benefits such as enhanced ecosystem services and reduced risks for coastal communities. This requires interdisciplinary decision-support tools that integrate heterogeneous data sources with short- and mid-term forecasts and long-term climate projections, and also couple oceanography, ecology, social sciences, economics, data analysis, and policy/stakeholder frameworks to enable consistent, actionable assessments across temporal and spatial scales and ecological, societal and economic dimensions.

The goal of this Research Topic is to bring together recent advances in data-based decision support tools that bridge the gap between environmental knowledge and practical application for the blue economy sectors, which can be implemented in real-world operational and management decisions across local, regional, and basin scales by a variety of stakeholders ranging from coastal communities and small-scale enterprises to industry, and public authorities.

We particularly encourage contributions that demonstrate operational and relocatable Digital Twin Ocean applications, integrating scenario testing and stakeholder-driven design to support regenerative, resilient and nature-positive ocean management, sustainable industry practices, as well as policy-uptake (e.g European Ocean Pact)

Recent technological advances in ocean modeling, remote sensing, artificial intelligence, and big data analytics have created opportunities to integrate diverse marine datasets for blue economy sectors such as fisheries, aquaculture, offshore energy, shipping, and coastal tourism.

However, a significant gap persists between these technological capabilities and their practical implementation. Despite the progress in operational oceanography and data analysis techniques (e.g. AI based), application of integrated systems to concrete management and planning decisions remains limited, often due to fragmentation of data sources, insufficient coupling of models across domains and the limited integration of economic and societal aspects, hampering the transformative shift toward more regenerative, resilient, and nature-positive practices despite the availability of technological capabilities.

This integration challenge is particularly critical for risk assessment and management, as marine stakeholders face increasing uncertainties from extreme weather events and climate change that require comprehensive, data-driven risk evaluation tools.

This Research Topic welcomes contributions that advance data-based decision support tools for sustainable blue economy management. We seek manuscripts addressing the integration of multi-source data across temporal scales, from real-time marine observations and long-term climate projections to societal and economic aspects with particular attention to their translation into operational services.

Specific themes include:
- Development of integrated ocean observation and modeling systems for blue economy applications (e.g. Digital Twins)
- Computational and machine learning approaches enhancing predictive skill and efficiency
- Artificial intelligence and machine learning approaches
- Private-public partnership enhancing ocean observing and FAIR data
- Risk assessment frameworks incorporating climate change scenarios and extreme events
- Operational decision support tools / use-cases for fisheries, aquaculture, offshore energy, shipping, coastal tourism.
- Demonstrations of Digital Twin Ocean applications in different sea basins, highlighting transferability and operational maturity
- Contributions that demonstrate socio-ecological co-benefits, such as enhanced ecosystem services, reduced vulnerability of coastal communities,
- Co-created, interdisciplinary frameworks that integrate scientific and stakeholder knowledge to ensure adoption by end-users and alignment with policies that promote nature-positive outcomes.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: Blue Economy, Marine environmental data, Data-based decision support, Integrated ocean observation, Ocean modeling, Digital Twins

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.