Building a digital twin of the ocean: 4D ecological monitoring with robotics, AI-powered analytics, and Grafana

Marine ecosystems face accelerating pressures from climate change, overexploitation, and habitat degradation, demanding continuous, high-resolution environmental intelligence. To achieve that, DIGI4ECO, a Horizon Europe project, is developing a 4D ecological monitoring system built on a digital twin of the ocean, integrating advanced robotics, AI-powered analytics, and unified data observability pipelines with Grafana. 

In this session, Jacopo Aguzzi, Senior Research Scientist at the Institute of Marine Sciences, and Enoc Martinez, Assistant Professor at the Electronic Engineering Department of UPC, discuss how DIGI4ECO's coordinated network of fixed and mobile robotic platforms forms a distributed "physical twin of the ocean." These platforms capture biological, environmental, opto-acoustic, and molecular (eDNA/eRNA) information at unprecedented temporal frequency and spatial resolution.

At the Digital Twin Ocean (DTO) layer, AI algorithms — including state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks and object-detection architectures (e.g., YOLO) — automatically identify species, compute ecological indicators, and characterize biodiversity trends. These indicators inform restoration strategies and support policy-relevant assessments aligned with EU biodiversity and restoration goals.

Jacopo and Enoc also share the interactive Grafana dashboards that visualize both physical and biological data streams, from oceanographic time series and acoustic profiles to AI-processed underwater imagery and ecological indicators. These dashboards demonstrate how observability tools can bridge robotics, environmental monitoring, and marine policy needs, turning complex ocean data into actionable intelligence.