The first year of activity was dedicated to set-up the workflow, including the development of the conceptual model and all technical elements. The general architecture includes the NODCs acting as data sources queried by the CDI User Interface (via EMODnet Chemistry web portal) and by the CDI Robot harvester (to generate the internal specific data buffers). All partners and subcontractors (acting as NODCs) were asked to submit their data to EMODnet infrastructure (i.e. submit the metadata as CDI files and keep copy of the data in Odv format) and the data are immediately available through EMODNet Chemistry CDI User Interface. For products generation, an automatic Robot Harvester, properly configured with predefined criteria of geographical and temporal coverage and parameters, was adopted to retrieve specific data sets from distributed data centers. It takes advantage of the CDI system and of SeaDataNet infrastructure to manage automatically the restricted and unrestricted data requests submitted to the involved data centers. MSFD boundaries were considered but larger areas were implemented for the data extraction in the 5 EMODnet regions:
• Baltic Sea
• North Sea area (including Norwegian Sea and Celtic Sea)
• Atlantic Sea area (including Atlantic Coast and Macaronesia)
• Black Sea
• Mediterranean Sea.
For the first year, we decided to focus the activity of data collection and products generation on nutrients, selecting the following set of parameters:
• PO4 in umol/l
• Total Phosphorus in umol/l
• NOx (=NO2+NO3 or NO3 only in case NO2 is missing) in umol/l
• NO3 in umol/l
• Total Nitrogen in umol/l
• NH4 in umol/l
• SiO4 in umol/l