The Digital Ocean Forum 2025, held in Brussels on 27–28 November 2025, brought together Europe’s ocean community to jointly advance the European Digital Twin Ocean (EDITO). The forum focused on co-creation, partnership and alignment with European ocean priorities, providing a shared space to better understand, manage and protect the Ocean through digital innovation. Mercator Ocean International contributed to the event through its active engagement in the co-development of the EU Digital Twin Ocean, with a strong emphasis on collaboration, community empowerment and support to EU strategies, including the EU Ocean Pact and the evolution of the Copernicus Marine Service.
Throughout the two days, Mercator Ocean International experts contributed to numerous sessions, covering both strategic and technical dimensions of the EU Digital Twin Ocean. Contributions included discussions on a shared digital ocean vision and real-world applications (Alain A., Fabrice M.), the integration of Copernicus Marine and the EU DTO (Pierre-Yves Le Traon), AI and high-performance computing for next-generation ocean prediction (Quentin G., Stella Valentina Paronuzzi Ticco), and community growth and funding opportunities (Renaud Dussurget). Additional sessions addressed the development of the EDITO platform (Marina T., Jérôme Gasperi), marine ecosystem modelling and the NECCTON Horizon project (Stefano Ciavatta), user onboarding and support on EDITO (Marie D., Gaëlle Hénaff Sterbik), and the EDITO ModelLab showcasing pioneering Digital Twin Ocean use cases (Yann D.).