European Multidisciplinary and Water-Column Observatory - European Research Infrastructure Consortium (EMSO ERIC): challenges and opportunities for strategic European marine sciences

EMSO (European Multidisciplinary Seafloor and water-column Observatory,
www.emso-eu.org) is a large‐scale European Research Infrastructure I. It
is a distributed infrastructure of strategically placed, deep‐sea seafloor and water
column observatory nodes with the essential scientific objective of real‐time, longterm
observation of environmental processes related to the interaction between the
geosphere, biosphere, and hydrosphere. The geographic locations of the EMSO observatory
nodes represent key sites in European waters, from the Arctic, through the
Atlantic and Mediterranean, to the Black Sea (Figure 1), as defined through previous
studies performed in FP6 and FP7 EC projects such as ESONET‐CA, ESONET‐NoE,
EMSO-PP (Person et al., 2015)