The 2025 NECCTON Annual Meeting in Trieste brought together experts to share advances in ecosystem modelling and the use of Copernicus Marine data to address fisheries, pollution, and biodiversity challenges. By promoting model interoperability, NECCTON supports the goals of the United Nations Ocean Decade.
Copernicus Marine and NECCTON: Building the Next Generation of Marine Services
NECCTON, short for New Copernicus Capability for Trophic Ocean Networks, is a Horizon Europe initiative led by the Plymouth Marine Laboratory. The project enhances the Copernicus Marine Service through integrated ecosystem models. Designed to simulate entire marine food webs, from plankton to fish, seabirds, and mammals, these models offer a holistic view of marine ecosystem functioning.
Overview of NECCTON’s approach, which is based on conceptual innovation, methodological innovation, and interlinked frameworks, designed to improve ecosystem representation and support the uptake of Copernicus Marine products. © NECCTON
NECCTON helps develop new products that support informed decision-making in fisheries, aquaculture, and biodiversity conservation.
Highlights from the 2025 NECCTON Annual Meeting
Held in the coastal city of Trieste, Italy, and hosted by the National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics, the 2025 NECCTON Annual Meeting brought together over 70 participants – scientists and ocean experts – both in person and remotely. The event served as a platform to share results and explore new tools and actions.
Sessions explored the development and connection of marine ecosystem models that simulate the dynamic interactions between species and their environment. Participants also presented use cases addressing climate-driven ocean change, pollution, and human pressures. One case study looked at the future of fish populations in the Arctic and North Atlantic, while another applied NECCTON’s modelling tools to simulate oil spill hazards in the Mediterranean, using historical spill data for validation. These examples demonstrate how physical and biogeochemical data from Copernicus Marine are being transformed into actionable insights for local authorities, conservationists, and fishery managers.
Presented at the 2025 NECCTON Annual Meeting, this use case modelled oil hazard in the Mediterranean Sea and validated their approach using real spill events which happened in the past. © NECCTON
One of the main focuses of the Annual Meeting was the importance of international collaboration. Marine researchers and centres from across Europe spoke on their mutual collaboration and explored how NECCTON tools could be adapted to different regions and environmental contexts. Other discussions highlighted the need for close engagement with local stakeholders to ensure that scientific results translate into actionable results.
NECCTON and the UN Ocean Decade: Global Science for a Sustainable Ocean
By fostering collaboration across research centres in Europe, NECCTON contributes to the goals of the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021–2030) (‘Ocean Decade’), a global initiative to generate actionable knowledge for a more sustainable relationship with the ocean. NECCTON has been officially endorsed as a UN Ocean Decade Action for its contribution to Challenge 2: Protect and restore ecosystems and biodiversity, guided by Vision 2030 Working Group 2. Frank Muller-Karger, co-chair of this group, and participant in the NECCTON meeting, remarked on the project’s significance: “You have an incredible group of modellers there. I don’t think I’ve seen such a project in bringing different types of models all together under one group to try to coordinate [common efforts].”
Next Steps: NECCTON and UNOC 2025
With the upcoming Third UN Ocean Conference in Nice (UNOC3), NECCTON serves as a model of how EU-funded research and operational services like Copernicus Marine can converge to deliver reliable, policy-relevant information. By combining scientific excellence with stakeholder engagement, NECCTON is shaping the future of sustainable ocean monitoring and management worldwide.
This article was originally published on the website of Copernicus Marine.