The EU DTO is a virtual replica of the ocean that makes ocean knowledge readily available to everyone. It integrates data from many different sources, including satellites, sensors, computer models and even personal devices like smartphone apps. These different data sources constantly “feed” the Digital Twin to provide continuous and up-to-date information about the ocean: from the behaviour of marine species to weather patterns, chemical processes, economic activities and much more.

The EU DTO provides both historical and near real-time information about the ocean’s real-world conditions and processes. This information can then be used to simulate real-world scenarios and predict the outcomes of different scenarios. 

To take just one example, scientists can use applications that are currently running on the EU DTO to simulate how seagrass meadows can protect against coastal hazards like flooding and erosion. By comparing these scenarios, users such as data scientists, decision-makers, local policy implementers and the wider public can understand the impact of seagrass on coastal ecosystems with an unparalleled level of detail and accuracy.

The EU DTO can help us answer questions around what’s happened, what’s happening now, and what might happen next with an unparalleled level of detail and accuracy. It fuels knowledge, decision-making and action for a sustainable Ocean.

EDITO is the core infrastructure platform of the European Digital Twin Ocean. It offers tools to those building digital twins to co-create the EU DTO, support science-based decision making, and ensure maximum impact for marine research & innovation actions across the key objectives of the EU Mission Ocean & Waters.

The development of the EDITO platform began under the framework of the “EU Public Infrastructure for the European Digital Twin Ocean” (EDITO-Infra) project, which ran from October 2022 to February 2025. This initiative continues with the “EDITO 2” project, currently running from March 2025-August 2028. Beyond the lifetime of these initial projects, EDITO is intended to evolve into a long-term public European infrastructure that extends beyond the lifetime of these projects. Its development is led by Mercator Ocean International (MOi) and VLIZ, on behalf of Copernicus Marine Service and EMODnet, respectively, currently with the support of Seascape Belgium as mandated organisation to administer the EMODnet Secretariat. By 2030, EDITO envisions a fully operational European Digital Twin Ocean platform, serving as a global benchmark for digital ocean solutions and democratised access to ocean knowledge.

EDITO is the core infrastructure platform of the European Digital Twin Ocean. It services and supports the ecosystem of research and innovation activities, projects, and initiatives, that are working to develop science-based, digital ocean models, twins and applications, connecting and making them interoperable towards co-creating the EU DTO.

Co-Creating the EU DTO

In Phase 1, EDITO-Infra began work on the underpinning infrastructure of the EU DTO. The project validated the potential of the EU DTO by upgrading, combining, and integrating key service components of existing EU ocean observing, monitoring and data programs, namely Copernicus Marine Service and the European Marine Observation & Data Network (EMODnet), into a single digital framework. 

Building on this foundation, and ensuring balanced representation of key European Commission services underpinning EDITO developments (i.e., Copernicus Marine and EMODnet), Phase 2 will scale up EDITO’s capabilities, expand the platform’s reach, ensuring accessibility for non-experts while enhancing its services for researchers and institutional contributors, and grow the community of projects and initiatives harnessing EDITO to co-create the EU DTO. 

Building the Community

In Phase 1, key members of the oceanographic community (i.e., related to EMODnet and Copernicus Marine services), and targeted Horizon Europe research & innovation projects (i.e., EDITO Model Lab) were engaged to co-design the EDITO platform. Early access was provided to a larger panel of users following specific calls for access, as beta-testers (e.g., DTO-BioFlow, Blue-Cloud, ILIAD, amongst many others).

Now, EDITO is continuing to establish links across an ecosystem of European research and innovation activities, projects, and initiatives, to co-create the European DTO. By engaging in open calls and targeted community building activities, the community will be able to tap on EDITO to host, process, and disseminate their findings. EDITO will also support regional and thematic applications of the EU DTO by enabling the development of “local twins,” as tailored digital tools addressing specific priorities of local stakeholder communities. These local twins will be particularly relevant in the Mission’s lighthouse areas—Atlantic-Arctic, Mediterranean Sea, Baltic-North Sea, and Danube-Black Sea—where they help implement and demonstrate restoration strategies in context-specific ways. Moreover, the infrastructure will continue to align with cross-sectoral initiatives and global collaborations. For instance, through its interoperability with programs like Destination Earth and international efforts such as the UN DITTO Programs.

EDITO is a data lake (a high-speed central storage) of all EMODnet and Copernicus Marine products. Located beside the data are virtual machines that run e.g., Jupyter notebooks, Python, etc. The concept is that, if you want to process Big Data, then you bring your code to EDITO rather than download the data sets. When you access datalab.dive.edito.eu you are running your code on virtual machines beside the data. You are still free to download data from the existing EMODnet and Copernicus Marine Portals to work on locally. EDITO is a complementary service focused on providing Cloud Computing services and the data products on the respective portals are identical to what is available through EDITO.

The EDITO service offer is geared at enabling the marine community to contribute to the co-creation of the EU DTO, while sparking an innovative knowledge ecosystem that evolves and scales up to expand its reach beyond expert users, to cater to non-expert users. The ambition behind the offer is to deliver on the promise of servicing decision makers across the public and private sector, civil society, and ultimately citizens.

To respond to different service needs and expectations from users, the EDITO service offer has been structured around 3 levels of entry and interaction with the EDITO platform, namely:

• EDITO Create: This service targets advanced users, such as marine scientists and developers, who are looking for fast access to ocean data, fast processing and computing capacity, advanced tools and models to be combined in workflows and/or in a development environment. It offers tools, models, and a collaborative virtual environment for building digital twins, generating new marine information, and/or developing new ways to use them.  
• EDITO Contribute: This service is targeted at “institutional” or “business” level users, including research projects, institutes, and private companies. It offers them tools to share their twinning developments, marine data, and/or services with the wider community, and become part of the EU DTO ecosystem.
• EDITO Explore: This service caters to all users, regardless of their expertise. It offers users the possibility to explore and navigate the resources of the platform without having to register and without adding new information to  the platform.
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The EDITO Community welcomes European, regional, national and local Research & Innovation projects and digital twinning initiatives to co-create the European Digital Twin Ocean. Register in EDITO to start using the platform and subscribe to the EDITO Newsletter to learn about onboarding milestones and opportunities to ensure and upscale the impact and legacy of your efforts. 

EDITO is first and foremost an infrastructure catering to anyone who is building an Ocean related digital twin, enabling them to carry out their work and share their own developments. If you are building a digital twin, it gears you up with high quality marine data, tools, and computing power to ease this process.

Yes, a user can do both! Users can upload their own models and data. They can also collaborate with other users by sharing data, process and knowledge. A free tier -including processing and data storage- is provided per user and project.

It solely depends on the access policy established for such data and/or models by the user who has uploaded them. Users have privacy management capabilities for their resources. Thereby, privacy is handled for every EDITO resource (i.e. data, processing and services).

The EDITO platform offers many built-in tools, including popular data science and ocean-oriented tools (e.g., viewer, library, packages). The offer goes well beyond that of a data viewer/renderer, to also include computation and automation. In addition, you can add new tools to your private space, if your favorite ones are not yet available. Register and Subscribe.