| Summary: | In Europe alone, private companies spent up to €3 billion annually on marine data: collecting it, purchasing it, processing it. This volume of data has huge potential to advance our understanding of deep-sea ecosystems: in fact, many Vulnerable Marine Ecosystems (VMEs) were first discovered by the offshore fisheries, telecommunications, and oil and gas sectors, and more recently while companies explore for potential areas to mine. ATLAS has made substantial in-roads to advance the understanding of ecosystems in the deep North Atlantic. These innovations can be shared with industry to improve business practice by reducing the cost of marine data and the appropriate application of the mitigation hierarchy. In Deliverable 6.4, ATLAS worked directly with its industry associate partners, Atlantic offshore industries and marine planners, regulators and authorities to disseminate some of its most industry-relevant innovations. Along the way, new data-sharing platforms such as the ATLAS GeoNode have been created to share key ATLAS outputs through the data broker EMODnet, and D6.4 also scoped out barriers within the industry to share privately held environmental data. A total of three industry-focussed international workshops and two questionnaires were implemented between 2016 and 2019. These helped to identify three principles of data-sharing to improve business practice and reduce costs: (1) future-proofing environmental datasets by considering potential future uses and collecting data at the highest possible resolution; (2) data collection techniques need to be standardised to allow comparisons to be made across years and datasets; and (3) the Atlantic community should endeavour to make maps of the seafloor, public assets, as approximately 75% of industry environmental data costs relate to bathymetric and geological data acquisition. The workshops and questionnaires also led to several ATLAS recommendations to improve business practice and reduce costs around data-sharing. Joint recommendations for industry, academia ...
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