MEMEX promotes social cohesion through collaborative, heritage-related storytelling tools that provide access to tangible and intangible Cultural Heritage (CH) for communities at risk of exclusion. The project implements new actions for social science to: understand the NEEDS of such communities and co-design interfaces to suit their needs; DEVELOP the audience through participation strategies; while increasing the INCLUSION of communities. The fruition of this will be achieved through ground breaking ICT tools that provide a new paradigm for interaction with CH for all end user. MEMEX will create new assisted Augmented Reality (AR) experiences in the form of stories that intertwine the memories (expressed as videos, images or text) of the participating communities with the physical places / objects that surround them. To reach these objectives, MEMEX develop techniques to (semi-)automatically link images to their LOCATION and connect to a new opensource Knowledge Graph (KG). The KG will facilitate assisted storytelling by means of clustering that links consistently user data and CH assets in the KG. Finally, stories will be visualised onto smartphones by AR on top of the real world allowing to TELL an engaging narrative. MEMEX will be deployed and demonstrated on three pilots with unique communities. First, Barcelona’s Migrant Women, which raises the gender question around their inclusion in CH, giving them a voice to valorise their memories. Secondly, MEMEX will give access to the inhabitants of Paris’s XIX district, one of the largest immigrant settlements of Paris, to digital heritage repositories of over 1 million items to develop co-authored new history and memories connected to the artistic history of the district. Finally, first, second and third generation Portuguese migrants living in Lisbon will provide insights on how technology tools can enrich the lives of the participants.

The CLIMAREST project - Coastal Climate Resilience and Marine Restoration Tools for the Arctic Atlantic basin - integrates multiple expertise into a holistic approach, to develop a toolbox designed to establish guidelines for ecosystem restoration and to enhance climate resilience in coastal communities. The concept is to develop, test and optimise a modular toolbox that integrates expert knowledge, scientific information, multilevel stakeholder and community involvement, ecosystem service improvement analysis, cost-benefit analysis, priority of actions, and custom designed protocols for restoring and monitoring multiple coastal habitats. The toolbox framework will have common and specific tools that will be tested, optimised and demonstrated in five different ecosystems, across a latitudinal gradient of the Arctic-Atlantic basin, ranging from the high-Arctic Svalbard (79° N) in the North to the Madeira archipelago (33° N) in the South. The variety of environmental conditions and restoration needs of the five demonstration sites will provide different restoration scenarios with particular specificities in terms of biodiversity, pressures and threats, ecosystems services and stakeholders. The diversity in restoration scenarios will create a unique opportunity to develop a modular toolbox, that integrates common tools with tools that are specific for each restoration scenario into a collective framework. Ecosystem-specific innovations in nature-based solutions for habitat restoration that improve local climate resilience will also be developed, tested, and integrated into a general toolbox framework, establishing guidelines and innovative workflows. The toolbox and tools developed in each demonstration site, for different restoration scenarios, will be made available and tested for replication and upscaling in comparable ecosystems and similar communities, with particular emphasis in promoting stakeholder involvement.

SEAMPHONI is dedicated to bringing visibility and safeguarding the vast and largely unprotected offshore marine areas. Current approaches to offshore biodiversity mapping are highly dependent on research vessels and are therefore costly and do not allow for continuous monitoring. SEAMPHONI is structured to promote the testing, coupling, and validation of three innovative monitoring solutions (environmental DNA (eDNA), acoustics, and imaging) and to build a shared observing system for scientists, decision-makers, MPA managers, and citizens in the form of an Intelligent Marine Digital Twin interoperable with the European Digital Twin Ocean. By leveraging and adapting these cutting-edge tools for offshore areas, SEAMPHONI will provide significant advancement towards a broader, more accurate mapping of European seas with baselines for understudied areas; faster, more continuous biodiversity monitoring; and more accurate, predictive, and sustainable models. This will help identify and prioritize areas to be protected and improve evidence-based assessments of i) the health of marine ecosystems and ii) the effects of various levels of protection and restoration measures on their functioning and services. SEAMPHONI will also tackle the complexity of the regulatory framework governing marine conservation and the fragmentation of rights within these zones, by evaluating limitations and underlining the need for clearer frameworks and improved coordination. The project will support the enforcement of Particularly Sensitive Sea Areas (PSSAs), and advance the 2030 GBF targets. Finally, SEAMPHONI will address the “emotional disconnect between society and aquatic ecosystems” (EC report, 2021) especially in offshore areas where the principle of "out of sight, out of mind" is most pronounced. Confronted with the challenges of engaging citizens in remote offshore areas, where traditional citizen science approaches are impractical, SEAMPHONI has embraced an artistic strategy.

The objective of the GoJelly project is to develop, test and promote a gelatinous solution to microplastic pollution by developing a TRL 5-6 prototype microplastics filter (GoJelly) for commercial and public use, where the main raw material is jellyfish mucus. In doing so, the consortium addresses two environmental issues with one approach by removing the commercially and ecologically destructive sea and coastal pollution of both jellyfish and microplastics. This innovative approach will ultimately lead to less plastic in the ocean, municipal demand (and thereby competitive prices) for jellyfish raw material to fill the "mucus-need" by filter developers, and in turn more jobs for commercial fishers in off-seasons. The by-products of the GoJelly biomass have other uses as well, ensuring that GoJelly also delivers a green innovation, resulting in novel, valuable resource for the food and feed industry as well as agro-biological fertilizer for organic farming. The GoJelly prototype products will be tested and demonstrated in three different European seas (Norwegian, Baltic and Mediterranean), by a range of stakeholders, including commercial fishers and industry partners. Tying it together, the project will also ensure the possibilities for broader European promotion and utilization of GoJelly at the local, regional and global level by delivering a socio-ecological methodological toolbox for forming and implementing policies. GoJelly will broadly communicate its results in several formats such as traditional social media, open lab ship cruise, and in the form of an experimental online game depicting different management scenarios under different jellyfish- and microplastics combinations. An interdisciplinary and international consortium consisting of technology developers, business analysts, fishing companies, research institutes, and both natural and social scientists will realize GoJelly, and will ensure the uptake of GoJelly products by industry and policy makers.

TWILIGHTED is a groundbreaking Horizon Europe Twinning project that seeks to revolutionize deep-sea research, development and innovation (RD&I) in Portugal, ultimately benefiting all of Europe. Collaborating closely with the esteemed European institutions of GEOMAR (Germany) and NTNU (Norway), TWILIGHTED aims to transform ARDITI (Madeira, Portugal) into a global hub for deep-sea RD&I. Focusing on the challenging Mesophotic Zone (40-200m) and the enigmatic Twilight Zone (200-1,000m), and capitalizing on Madeira's unique proximity to deep waters, TWILIGHTED will help accelerate our global understanding of the ocean and its essential role in sustaining life on earth. TWILIGHTED’s key objectives are to: (1) Collaborate across research institutes in Europe, (2) Elevate the research profile of Portugal and especially the European Outermost Region of Madeira, (3) Innovate low-cost alternatives to state-of-the-art deep-sea research technologies, (4) Democratize deep-sea research, (5) Globalize deep-sea RD&I and (6) Share ocean science across stakeholders. To achieve its objectives, TWILIGHTED will adopt state-of-the-art approaches to training and networking. Development activities include staff exchanges, expert visits, training schools, joint research missions, the International Twilighted Conference and novel cross-sector workshops stimulating creativity in solving the ocean’s greatest challenges (the Impossible Things Workshops). Such capacity-building will not only catalyze deep-sea RD&I in Madeira, but ensure a lasting impact on the deep-sea scientific landscape, sustainable ocean policy and Madeira’s socioeconomic development. TWILIGHTED marks the start of a transformative journey for Portugal, redefining its role in understanding and protecting vital deep-sea ecosystems. TWILIGHTED will also facilitate greater diversity and collaboration in time-critical matters of ocean sustainability and leave a significant mark on the global pursuit for more democratic science.