We cannot begin to forecast the future behaviour of our seas and oceans unless we understand the past. The aim of EU’s “marine knowledge 2020” initiative is to transform Europe’s fragmented activities for observing the sea into an integrated coherent package that increases efficiency for marine and maritime professionals from industry, public authorities and academia, that encourages innovation and that reduces our present uncertainty as to what is happening beneath the sea surface.
This is a prime candidate for a crowd sourced approach to fill in the many gaps between existing data sets. For example, TeamSurv will fulfil this for bathymetry. TeamSurv was developed in the CoSuDEC FP7 project.