In the first months of the project, the Stakeholder Advisory Board (SAB) has been established to ensure the project goals are consistent with the needs of beneficiaries, suggesting where feasible, additional work to help realise social, environmental and economic benefits for the broadest possible range of stakeholders and public. In total, 7 workshops/webinars have been organized to collect the users needs and feedback (reported in WP2 deliverables) and used to identify and fine-tuned the HiSea services.
Hydrodynamics and water quality models have been developed for the Greek and Valencia sites, and on-demand services capable of simulating transport, dispersion and fate of oil spills, algae blooms and jellyfish blooms are also made available. In addition, an extra number of demonstration cases were also added to the HiSea portfolio. With the introduction of the Atlantic sites in Portugal and the extended site in Ireland, the consortium demonstrated its capability to provide added value services to a broader spectrum of potential users.
The HiSea platform was also designed together with the users. The initial version of the platform was launched in February 2020 and feedback was gathered. Further improvements based on the user experience had been worked on and a new version of the platform was presented during a hands-on webinar in May 2021. The platform, currently available at
https://hisea.hidromod.com/(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) offers a flexible dashboard easily adaptable according to the user needs. Moreover, users can define and set thresholds and display warnings and alerts if a certain threshold has been exceeded. The platform integrates different modules and various data sources from external providers, data from local databases, high-resolution model output, and complementary algorithms. Measures of uncertainties and probabilities of exceedance of thresholds are used to highlight the accuracy of provided estimates. The validation metrics and procedures have been settled and carried out for the remote sensing and the models. This validation has been reported D6.3.
The consortium accomplished the innovation and planned exploitation activities for commercialisation. A project-specific innovation management approach and plan to provide (a) a conceptual framework for all partners to work towards the final outcome of this project, namely, marketable, novel, next-generation marine-based downstream information services, and (b) guidance to follow in all project work concerned with business development, business planning, and preparation for market introduction. This was presented in D7.5. The market assessment and analysis were presented in D7.1. Finally, D7.4 reports on the ethics requirements related to collecting, storing, and processing personal data and D7.6 on IPR management & Technology transfer.
Different activities were identified to maximize the impact of the project's results through marketing and communication of the project results to a wide range of relevant audiences. A communication and dissemination plan was developed in the early stages of the project by the Dissemination, Communication & Visibility leader, Agora, in consultation with all project partners to guarantee the dissemination of HiSea results and assuring that the project's main findings were spread to the target groups and to the wider public. The marketing activities and materials carried out throughout the entire duration of the project have been reported in D8.3 and in D8.1 D8.2 and D8.4.
