FOCCUS Newsletter ISSUE 05
In this edition:
- Editorial: From observations to impact
- Featured article: Advancing coastal intelligence with nearshore observations: new datasets from SOCIB
- FOCCUS & EDITO: bringing the coastal zone to the Digital Twin Ocean
- Outputs & publications: deliverable D8.1 and scientific publications
- Factsheet spotlight: seagrass, land-based pollution, offshore wind
- Events recap: From OSM2026, to EMD 2026 and everything in between
- What's Next
The Horizon Europe project FOCCUS aims to enhance Copernicus Marine Service's coastal dimension by developing innovative products and integrating Copernicus with Member States services. It facilitates seamless ocean monitoring and forecasting across global, regional, and coastal scales, reinforcing Copernicus research for challenges like coastal protection and sustainable blue economy development.
FOCCUS - From observations to impact
Coastal zones cover less than 10% of the ocean surface but account for the vast majority of human interaction with the sea — fishing, shipping, tourism, energy, and increasingly, climate adaptation. Yet they remain the least well-observed part of the ocean system. FOCCUS was built to help change that, and this spring, across six events on three continents, we saw what that change looks like in practice: sessions full, conversations flowing, applications being demonstrated live — and one unplanned live demo of our seagrass application at European Maritime Day that captured, better than any planned presentation could, where this project has arrived.
As we head into our 2nd General Assembly in Norway this June and deeper into the project’s final demonstration phase this edition highlights how FOCCUS is transforming coastal observations into actionable information for science, management, and society. We hope it energises you as much as the past few months have energised us.
Angeliki Karampourouni
Communications Lead, FOCCUS
Advancing coastal intelligence with nearshore observations: new datasets from SOCIB
Nearshore areas — where waves break, sediments are transported, and coastal communities interact with the sea — remain among the least observed components of the marine environment. Through FOCCUS, the Balearic Islands Coastal Observing System (SOCIB) has released two high-resolution nearshore datasets: a coastal topobathymetry dataset covering three beaches in the Balearic Islands (Cala Millor, Son Bou, and Muro), and a high-frequency wave dataset providing continuous hourly wave measurements at the same sites. Together, these datasets provide critical ground-truth data to validate and improve coastal operational models, assess erosion and flooding risks, and inform climate adaptation strategies and coastal management efforts across Europe. Both datasets are openly available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.
Read the full article on the FOCCUS website →
Call for Papers — Ocean Science Special Issue
The Special Issue “FOCCUS: Advances in European Coastal Observations and Forecasting for Climate Resilience” is now officially open for submissions in Ocean Science (EGU/Copernicus Publications). While initiated by the FOCCUS project, this volume welcomes contributions from the wider community exploring the integration of coastal observations, AI-enhanced physics modelling, and innovative data assimilation to support coastal resilience and decision-making. Papers addressing applications co-developed with users — including coastal protection and management, blue economy activities, and climate resilience — are particularly encouraged.
Submission deadline: 15 December 2026.
Submit your paper here →
FOCCUS & EDITO: bringing the coastal zone to the Digital Twin Ocean
One of the defining partnerships of FOCCUS’s current phase is its growing collaboration with EDITO — the European Digital Twin Ocean, the public platform developed by Mercator Ocean International to give users access to integrated ocean data, models, and applications at European scale. This period saw two major milestones in the relationship. First, the EDITO team delivered a dedicated hands-on training for the FOCCUS consortium, covering all key aspects of onboarding: data integration and transfer, use of the Validation Toolbox, data visualisation within EDITO, and how to explore and deploy applications. This was a concrete and important step in equipping FOCCUS partners with the skills to make coastal data, models and applications broadly accessible through the European Digital Twin Ocean — moving from in-project outputs to open science resources.
Second, and most visibly, the FOCCUS seagrass/Posidonia coastal protection application — which models seasonal Posidonia traits to improve nature-based coastal restoration and climate resilience strategies — has been formally onboarded to the EDITO platform. The application was publicly showcased live at European Maritime Day 2026 through the EDITO demo stand, making it one of the most visible demonstrations of FOCCUS results to date. Further FOCCUS applications are being prepared for onboarding in the coming months.
Explore FOCCUS coastal applications →
Growing our open knowledge base
FOCCUS continues to make all publicly available deliverables accessible through the project website and the FOCCUS Zenodo community. The spotlight deliverable this edition is D8.1 — Inventory of Applications, presenting a catalogue of coastal applications co-designed within the project, their use cases, and validation strategies — one of the clearest overviews of what FOCCUS is building and for whom.
Three new peer-reviewed papers are also out. Gramcianinov, Stanev, Jacob and Staneva (2026), published open access in Ocean Modelling, uses high-resolution unstructured grid modelling to investigate submesoscale eddy dynamics on the Northwestern Black Sea shelf, revealing how barotropic and baroclinic instabilities drive eddy generation and how these eddies facilitate brackish water transport — directly relevant to FOCCUS's seamless coastal modelling work. Vona et al. (2025) in Frontiers in Remote Sensing documents how Po River discharge shapes coastal marine conditions in the Adriatic, while Chen, Staneva et al. (2025) in Applied Ocean Research presents an AI-enhanced approach for high-resolution coastal water quality reconstruction from model and satellite data — both presented at OSM2026 in Glasgow.
Translating science into practice
The FOCCUS factsheet collection translates complex modelling approaches and data products into clear, user-oriented narratives for researchers, service providers, coastal managers, and policy actors. Three factsheets connect particularly well with the themes of this edition.
Land-based Pollution and Eutrophication in the North Sea presents the FOCCUS approach to monitoring and modelling nutrient and pollutant inputs from rivers and land run-off using integrated hydrological and biogeochemical models, supporting more accurate assessment of water quality and ecosystem health. This connects directly to the land-sea coupling approach at the heart of FOCCUS, and to the Vona et al. study on river discharge and Adriatic marine conditions. Download →
Offshore Windfarm Operation & Co-Use of Resources in the German Bight shows how high-resolution coastal modelling can serve real multi-sector decision-making for offshore windfarm operations and multi-use co-existence — one of the fastest-growing sectors in the European blue economy. This connects to the work presented at EGU 2026. Download →
Seagrass as a Nature-Based Coastal Protection Service: Posidonia oceanica meadows are among the most effective natural buffers against coastal erosion and wave energy. The FOCCUS application modelling seasonal Posidonia traits advances our understanding of how these ecosystems can be harnessed as nature-based solutions for coastal restoration and climate resilience — now formally live on EDITO.
Explore all FOCCUS factsheets →
Spring 2026 was an exceptionally active period that has taken FOCCUS partners across five countries and three continents — a sprint of events that underlines how far the project’s results have travelled. What began in February at the Ocean Sciences Meeting in Glasgow and wound through Mexico, Darmstadt, Vienna, and Cyprus before culminating at European Maritime Day in Limassol was not just a series of conference appearances. It was a consistent, evolving story about what happens when open-ocean science is brought into genuine contact with coastal realities.
At OSM2026 in Glasgow, FOCCUS co-chaired the oral session “Advances in the Digital Ocean for Coastal Monitoring and Forecasting” and contributed posters on coastal risk assessment in the North-Western Black Sea and AI-enhanced suspended particulate matter reconstruction from satellite and model data. Project Coordinator Joanna Staneva (Hereon) then travelled to Mérida for the CoastPredict General Assembly, making the case for a stronger end-to-end coastal value chain and highlighting the fragmentation FOCCUS is built to address. Back in Europe, Johannes Schulz-Stellenfleth (Hereon) presented at the Copernicus National Forum in Darmstadt.
May was particularly intense. EGU26 in Vienna saw FOCCUS co-convene Session OS4.3 — Advances in Ocean Coastal Monitoring and Forecasting, with contributions ranging from surface current uncertainties in French coastal waters and AI-enhanced modelling to offshore wind and the open-to-coastal continuum. Then Larnaca hosted the 11th EuroGOOS International Conference, where FOCCUS presented advances in coastal modelling through multi-platform data integration, enhanced Member State coupling, and applications for coastal zone protection and blue economy activities.
The season ended at European Maritime Day 2026 in Limassol. Joanna Staneva joined the workshop “Science and Innovation for Coastal Resilience” alongside the European Commission DG RTD and CMCC Foundation, then delivered an unplanned live demonstration of the FOCCUS seagrass application through the EDITO demo stand — showing policymakers and practitioners, in real time, a tool that models seasonal Posidonia traits to support nature-based coastal restoration. That application is now formally onboarded to the European Digital Twin Ocean. It is one of the most visible signs yet that FOCCUS results are not waiting to be used — they are already in use.
FOCCUS Project Coordinator Joanna Staneva
demonstrates the FOCCUS Seagrass application live at European Maritime Day 2026, Limassol
Looking ahead
The 2nd FOCCUS General Assembly convenes in Norway in June — the key internal milestone for reviewing progress across all work packages and aligning the consortium ahead of the final demonstration phase of the project.
June is packed with external events too. FOCCUS will have a poster at IWMO 2026 in Palma, Spain (2–5 June). The following week, many partners will head to Brussels for Digital Ocean Week (8–12 June), which brings together the Copernicus Marine General Assembly, OceanEye, and the AI Ocean Forum under one roof — a key moment for the European ocean science and services community. Later in June, the OSTST meeting in Wiesbaden, Germany (22–26 June) brings together the international satellite altimetry community — directly relevant to FOCCUS work on sea-level and coastal observations.
Looking further ahead, ECSA61 — the Estuarine & Coastal Sciences Association
conference — comes to Brussels (24–27 August), with a dedicated FOCCUS session bridging science and coastal policy. And in September, Geolit 2026 in Cádiz, Spain (23–25 September) brings together geomatics, marine technology, and ocean science communities, as part of FOCCUS’s ongoing engagement with the Spanish coastal science network.
Ongoing activities to watch: validated model releases and technical milestones as the project moves deeper into its demonstration phase; new scientific publications from across the consortium; new factsheets and application documentation in preparation; and continued integration with EDITO as further FOCCUS applications are onboarded to the platform.
