The second PREP4BLUE Consortium Meeting took place from the 27th– 28th of September 2023. The meeting was held in the ISMAR Istituto di Scienze Marine in Venice, Italy, and was hosted by PREP4BLUE partners CNR (Italy).
The two-day event featured a range of different activities. To open the meeting PREP4BLUE coordinators IFREMER (France) gave a brief welcome speech and provided an overview of project progress to date. This was followed up with an update on the Mission landscape and presentations from the Mission Secretariat, the four other Mission CSAs: BlueMissionMEDBlueMissionBanos, BlueMissionAA and EcoDaLLi and, MIP Ocean.
After the opening session, the meeting proceeded with presentations from partners on the progress achieved by each of the project’s six work packages to date. Each presentation was followed up by a Q&A session.
The first day concluded with a networking dinner for all partners.
Day two saw further discussions on work package progress, cross-cutting issues and on next steps for PREP4BLUE. The day concluded with a series of workshops for partners. The first workshop provided an overview of the Mission Ecosystem Database being developed by partners from WP4, while the second workshop focused on demonstrating the stakeholder engagement tool that is being developed by WP6
The meeting took place in hybrid format to facilitate those who could not be there in person. This was the first full consortium meeting since the project kick off meeting, which was held in Brussels in September 2022. It was a great opportunity for partners to connect again and discuss the next steps for the project.
