European Digital Twin of the Ocean (EDITO)

The European Digital Twin of the Ocean is an initiative the European Commission launched in 2022 as part of the EU Mission "Restore Our Ocean and Waters". EDITO is its core infrastructure, led by Mercator Ocean International and the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) on behalf of the Commission. Two Horizon Europe projects, EDITO-Infra and EDITO-Model Lab, built the first integrated environment between 2022 and 2025, combining data from the Copernicus Marine Service, EMODnet and other European observing systems; a second phase (2025 to 2028, EU grant agreement 101227771) is meant to scale it into an operational, user-driven system. It is designed to be compatible with Destination Earth. The 2022 design describes three blocks: a data lake, a live model on high-performance computing, and a front-end simulation layer for user applications.

The platform offers decision-support applications framed as questions: a marine plastic tracker, a turtle drift tracker, a sargassum drift tracker, coastal erosion and nature-based solutions, tuna futures, seasonal chlorophyll forecasts, tide lines from earth observation, ocean carbon, and GLONET, an AI ocean forecasting system. Onboarded projects include SEADITO (social-ecological models with case studies in the Baltic Sea, North Sea and Mediterranean), SURIMI (nine socio-ecological fisheries models), FOCCUS (coastal forecasting), CoCliCo (a web platform on coastal risk from sea-level rise, which the page calls open source) and ACCIBERG's OpenBerg iceberg-drift tool.

What is open: EDITO describes itself as a free, public platform. Copernicus Marine and EMODnet data can be explored in the viewer without signing up. A registered user can process data on demand, run predefined services, add and publish data, services, processes and tutorials to the catalogues, work in groups and connect to EuroHPC, GitHub, GitLab or Kaggle; computing resources are requested through a form and granted after review. The project also runs calls for financial support to third parties and onboards outside research projects. The pages read do not name a licence for the platform's own code or say whether there is a public API.

Status: a first demonstration version was presented at the UN Ocean Conference in Nice in 2025, and the pages say the 2025 to 2028 phase is to make it fully operational.