Horizon Ocean Mission: Marine Habitat Mapping
Funds four €7–7.75M projects that map marine habitat condition at scale, working with public authorities to hit new EU nature-restoration deadlines.
The EU’s Nature Restoration Regulation gives every coastal member state a hard deadline to map and grade the condition of its marine habitats — seagrass meadows, kelp and other macroalgal forests, shellfish and maerl beds, sponge and coral beds, vents and seeps, deep soft sediments. Most don’t yet have the tools or the coverage to do that at the scale the law demands, or to feed the same data into…
Testing and demonstrating in the field, at large scale, the best available methods and tools for mapping the distribution and condition of the marine habitats covered by the Nature Restoration Regulation — EUNIS habitat types under Annex II, priority given to Groups 1–6, then Group 7. Each proposal covers one Mission basin-scale ‘lighthouse’ — Atlantic and Arctic, Mediterranean, Baltic and North Sea, or Danube including the Black Sea — and runs demonstration activities in at least 4 large areas inside it. Funded work also includes building a replication blueprint with national and regional authorities, engaging at least 4 ‘associated regions’ to test uptake and build local capacity, and feeding the resulting data into EMODnet and the EU Digital Twin Ocean.
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