CYBELE Horizon 2020 project
I2S is a partner in CYBELE project that supports precision agriculture and livestock farming through secure access to large scale, HPC-enabled virtual industrial experimentation environments, empowering scalable big data analytics. I2S is responsible for the aquaculture use case, where the project will make use of image processing technology in order to process aerial images of fish farms taken from drones to support understanding the impact of the farm on the environment, early identification of algae blooms that can be dangerous for the fish and ensuring that the farm is in a good condition.

The objective of the project is to develop (co-designing) 6 commercially-oriented, operational Earth Observation based services in sustainable fisheries and aquaculture under a common service delivery platform leveraging on Copernicus data and services, complemented by other EO and in-situ data streams while delivering economic, social and policy value to European citizens, developing a new market of product and services.

The AquaSmart project was about enhancing innovation capacity within the aquaculture sector, by helping companies to transform captured data into knowledge using an on-line data analytics platform. It also supports production bench-marking through access to global data. The project was based in the real world, addressing actual problems that aquaculture producers face and is run by a skilled and experienced consortium including top research institutes, a major player in the aquaculture IT sector and three highly innovative aquaculture companies. ΑquaSmart finished on February 2017 and is already being exploited.

The objective of the project was to support capacity building in interdisciplinary research communities actively involved in increasing scientific knowledge about resource over-exploitation, degraded environment and ecosystem with the aim of providing a more solid ground for informed advice to competent authorities and to enlarge the spectrum of growth opportunities as addressed by the Blue Growth Societal Challenge. BlueBRIDGE aims to develop innovative services in the following areas:

• Blue Assessment – services for stock assessment and for the generation of unique identifiers for global stocks;
• Blue Economy – services supporting the analysis of socio-economic performance in aquaculture;
• Blue Environment – spatial planning services to identify aquaculture and fisheries infrastructures from satellite imagery;
• Blue Skills – on-line training services and capacity building on existing training modules for fisheries scientists and other practitioners.

Within the context of BlueBRIDGE VREs, I2s developed a service that increases aquaculture productivity, by helping companies to make an in-depth analysis of their performance, create models for feeding, feed conversion and mortality, make predictions and take decisions. This will help them to improve productivity and will also extend the capacity of scientific research communities and policy makers to quantify and comprehend aqua-farming industry operation ensuring sustainability and development of the sector.