MINKE: Metrology for Integrated Marine Management and Knowledge-Transfer Network

MINKE will integrate the main European research infrastructures in marine metrology, to coordinate their use and development and to propose an innovative “oceanographic data quality” framework for the different European actors in charge of monitoring and managing marine ecosystems. MINKE proposes a new vision in the design of marine monitoring networks, considering two dimensions of data quality, accuracy and completeness, as driving components of quality in data acquisition. This new vision will be framed in a quintuple helix model of innovation, incorporating all the elements involved in the design of the surveillance network:

• The context (ocean health), identifying the Essential Ocean Variables (EOVs) as the key parameters to monitor.
• Civil society (NGOs, creative community, social media and citizen science platforms) as key actors to ensure data completeness.
• The academic world, researching new methods to ensure the accuracy and overall quality of end products, developing
  tools to integrate information from the most qualified oceanographic instruments and low-cost instrumentation.
• Industry, which improves the performance of observations with new instrumentation, data transmission systems and cost-effective technologies.
• Governments, which provide the legal and socio-economic frameworks to develop the proposed network.

The present proposal, through the different Integration Activities (Networking, Transnational-Virtual Access and Joint Research), aims to lay the foundations to create the necessary synergies between the different actors involved in the innovation model of the quintuple helix, creating a new community with complementary capacities for Ocean and Coastal Observation, facilitating the transition towards a blue growth socio-economic system.