Campus de Excelencia Internacional

The Campus of International Excellence of the University of Oviedo has established the Ocean Observatory of Asturias (OMA), an initiative that seeks to promote the reseach related to marine and coastal ecosystems of Asturias. The Observatory was created as a Strategic Association of Research Group in which cross-curricular groups of the University of Oviedo participate, in order to gather and share the information about the Asturian sea with the scientific community, the citizenship, the professionals and the administrations.

This information will lead to the creation of global and specific statistics and reports, as well as the development of research, analysis and projections on the marine and coastal environment, becoming a platform for research, teaching, observation, technological development and transference of results.

The University of Oviedo, through this project, seeks to become a regional, national and international point of reference for the observation and research related to the sea. On these lines, it is worth mentioning the monitoring and detection of changes in the marine environment; the research on marine resources, or the development of technologies applied to the observation of the sea. A website will give access to the environmental measurements and the data gathered by the research teams, as well as to the scientific works related to the Cantabric Sea.

The Observatory will incorporate equipment of the University of Oviedo used in the observation and research of the marine and costal ecosystems, among which there are ítems already present in the Unit of Oceanographic Sampling, a network of observation whose core is composed by two buoys-financed by the INNOCAMPUS program- and diverse equipment from the Department of Organisms and Systems Biology, among others. This network has advanced environmental, meteorological, physical, chemical and biological sensors, and has an infrastructure of spatial data that has a geoportal with web access and viewers to show georeferenced information.

This project will also contribute to the internationalization and integration into the territory of the University of Oviedo, by incrementing its presence in national and international networks and platforms, and to involve the entrepreneurial and social tissue of Asturias. This initiative is part of the Cluster of Energy, the Environment and Climate Change of Ad Futurum and has the financial support of the Santander Bank, through a recent agreement signed by the University of Oviedo and the banking entity.

The OMA will have Professor José Luis Acuña as its Scientific Director, and will have a Scientific Committee that will be in charge of proposing an Annual Action Plan.

The researchers that initially joined the project, and their respective research groups, are:

• Eva García Vázquez, Department of Functional Biology
• Heather Stoll, Department of Geology
• José Manuel Rico Ordás, Department of Organisms and Systems Biology
• José Manuel Costa Fernández, Department of Physical and Analytical Chemistry
• Fernando Las-Heras Andrés, Department of Electrical, Electronical, Computer and System Engineering
• Consolación Fernández González, Department of Organisms and Systems Biology
• Julio Arrontes Junquera, Department of Organisms and Systems Biology
• María Gloria Blanco Blanco, Department of Functional Biology