Grafana in the Ocean: A Digital Twin Powered by Grafana for Marine Conservation Research at DIGI4ECO

What does it take to build a real-time digital twin of the ocean — and can Grafana serve as its front end? At GrafanaCON 2026 Barcelona, Jacopo Aguzzi (Marine Science Institute of Barcelona, CSIC) and Enoc Martinez (UPC Technical University of Catalonia) show exactly how they're doing it with the EU-funded DIGI4ECO project.

Jacopo opens with the ecological stakes: trawl fishing sweeps entire seafloor ecosystems daily, plastic pollution is everywhere, and the EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive requires measuring 11 ecological indicators — from seabed status to species biodiversity to seafood contaminants — to define "Good Environmental Status." The problem: traditional vessel-based data collection costs up to €25,000/day per ship, vessels are perpetually overbooked, and the ocean is vastly under-sampled. DIGI4ECO's answer is a network of autonomous robotic platforms: cabled observatories (continuous real-time data, multi-year operation), landers (standalone, ~1 year battery), and docked crawlers that sweep hectare-scale areas around fixed platforms, controlled remotely from shore.

The project targets four coastal ecosystems — Galway Bay (Ireland), OBSEA off Barcelona (Spain), Kristineberg (Sweden), and Ancona (Italy) — ingesting three classes of data: biological (AI-powered underwater image analysis for species classification), acoustic (bioacoustic monitoring via hydrophones), and geochemical (dissolved oxygen, methane, CO2, nitrate, pH, salinity, temperature, currents). The goal: continuously updated virtual replicas of each ecosystem, feeding "what if" climate scenarios modeled against IPCC projections.

Enoc takes over for the engineering reality of OBSEA — 17 years of continuous operation, 4 miles off Villanova i la Geltrú in a Natura 2000 protected area. The stack: PostgreSQL + TimescaleDB for time series, ERDDAP for file-based assets (video, audio, images), and Grafana as the visualization layer. He demos the actual Grafana dashboards in production: CTD (conductivity, temperature, depth) time series with data quality metrics; wave height/period/direction via a windrose plugin; underwater acoustic spectrograms pre-computed from 24/7 100kHz hydrophone recordings; YOLO-based fish species detection with time series extraction and per-image inspection; sensor biofouling detection (salinity drops when shellfish colonize the conductivity cell of a sensor worth tens of thousands of euros); sensor asset management with deployment history, before/after photos, and per-sensor timelines; fleet-level sensor lifetime dashboards for managing hundreds of instruments at once; and IT infrastructure monitoring via Zabbix feeding into Grafana.

One honest gap: DIGI4ECO needs to visualize 4D gridded data — time, latitude, longitude, and depth — for satellite imagery and oceanographic model output. That capability doesn't exist in Grafana today, and it's the one missing piece before Grafana can serve as a complete front end for an ocean digital twin.

DIGI4ECO is a four-year EU project. Two years in, the team has harmonized data across all four sites. The next two years focus on scientific products, statistical analysis from ocean observations, and live "what if" scenario modeling. All dashboards are live at OBSEA.

Links/resources:
Learn about DIGI4ECO: https://digi4eco.eu
Get started with the Grafana Cloud forever-free tier: https://grafana.com/g/cloud
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