What are digital ocean twins (DOTS or DTOs)?
Digital ocean twins (DOTs), or digital twins of the ocean (DTOs), are an emerging concept that has the potential to revolutionize decision-making processes.
The aim of digital ocean twins is to provide transdisciplinary, accurate, informed digital representations of real-world systems that combine real time data, historical data, models, and simulations into an interoperable (“FAIR”) framework for decision making. Digital twins democratize access to information as they provide a user-friendly, interactive, visual interface and allows the exploration of “what-if” scenarios.
Who are digital ocean twins for?
Digital ocean twins are for everyone! An important part of designing DTOs is the identification of end users. This may include municipalities, policy makers, developers of ocean or coastal infrastructure (e.g., offshore wind developments), community members, students, or members of the public learning about the connection between humans and the ocean environment. Following end user identification, the content, design, and language of the DTO can then be tailored as needed.
What can digital ocean twins be used for?
A digital twin can provide accurate representation of an ocean system of interest. These digital representations of ocean systems can cross physical, ecological, economic, and social domains to integrate information. Integrated information that is directly tied to real-world systems and updates as those systems evolve can inform teaching and learning.
Digital twins can be used for many different purposes. Primarily, they allow for the exploration of a real-world system in a virtual environment. For example, an appropriate digital ocean twin could allow marine spatial planning authorities to understand the various impacts of different placements of a proposed off-shore wind farm. Or, in another example, allow users to experiment with the routing of maritime vessels for optimizing for efficiency, or even the effect of changes in fisheries management policies.
With the use of what-if scenarios, DOTs and DTOs can help start conversations about future conditions, support policy, management and research decisions, and illuminate trade-offs between different societal and policy priorities.
Demonstrations and prototypes developed by SINTEF Ocean
SINTEF Ocean has developed a portfolio of digital ocean twins for a range of sectors (e.g., marine restoration, algal bloom risk analysis) and user groups (e.g., decision-makers from municipalities, practitioners, environmental resource managers). This portfolio also includes services that can be used to develop digital ocean twins. Some highlights include:
- In the SINTEF Ocean led Demonstrator Use Case in the DTO-Bioflow project (Biodiversity Data for Digital Twins of the Ocean, users are able to experiment with a digital twin that combines various data streams on low-trophic biomass for ocean health monitoring (e.g., anticipate algal blooms). In this DTO, real time acoustics and silhouette camera imaging, for instance collected using the OceanLab Observatory, are combined to inform decision makers about potential changes to low-trophic communities such as zooplankton. These play a critical role in marine food webs and can provide indications of ocean health.
Read more:
DUC 6 Lower-trophic level biomass monitoring to inform ocean governance | DTO-BIOFLOW
Access the demonstrator: Streamlit - A core outcome of the Coastal Climate Resilience and Marine Restoration Tools for the Arctic Atlantic basin (CLIMAREST) project was the development of a digital toolbox for marine restoration. The toolbox includes marine restoration DTO demonstrators, which showcase how DTOs can be used to inform decision making surrounding the design and monitoring of marine restoration projects.
Read more:
Digital Twin-Like Applications - Marine Restoration Toolbox
The Svalbard digital twin - Slik har Svalbard blitt et digitalt miljø-laboratorium
Access them through the Blue-Cloud platform EcologicalRestorationLab - Marine Restoration Lab. - The Social-Ecological ocean management Applications with Digital Ocean Twins (SEADOTs) project focuses on integrating social-ecological (social, ecological, and economic) data into three digital ocean twins with a focus on offshore wind developments. The Norwegian demonstrator focuses on the development of Utsira Nord, the world’s largest floating offshore wind park. These digital twins aim to provide local decision makers (e.g., from municipalities) information for wholistic decision making on the development of offshore wind installations.
- As part of the Iliad Digital Twins of the Ocean - SINTEF) project, SINTEF Ocean developed ILIAD - Water Quality and Environmental Twin Trondheimsfjorden (prototype) - Public - Dashboards - Grafana, where users can interact with real time data collected through the OceanLab observatory and particle distribution modelling in a decision-support dashboard. The aim of this DTO is to demonstrate how water quality can be monitored for environmental impact assessments.
- The SemanticMatter platform provide tools to i) document your data (how it was produced, and what is the meaning of each data point), together with a vocabulary, relationships and constraints that fits your specific industry or research field. ii) Provide a way to define data pipelines (how data flows from different sources into the digital twins) from questions asked in natural language. iii) Provides automatic, event-based workflows that react to changes (for example a specific event such as a sensor reading) and trigger actions (for instance invoking a digital twin) without additional manual work.