D4Science DNA1.4a - Project periodic report: 01/01/2008-31/12/2009

The project aims at creating a production quality e-Infrastructure for addressing the needs of twomajor target disciplines: Environmental Monitoring and Fisheries and Aquaculture ResourcesManagement. This e-Infrastructure will be obtained by deploying, progressively enriching andconsolidating the ones built so far by the EGEE and DILIGENT projects. Through the new e-Infrastructure scientists of the addressed and other challenging areas will increasingly obtain morefacilities for creating Virtual Research Environments (VREs). These VREs will be based on sharedcomputation, storage, and generic service resources offered by EGEE and DILIGENT at aEuropean level, as well as on data and domain-specific service resources offered by largeinternational organizations, such as the European Space Agency, the Food and AgricultureOrganization of the United Nations, and the Consultative Group on International AgricultureResearch. It is expected that the D4Science e-Infrastructure will have a multiplicative benefit tomany scientific fields, and also act as a catalyst for the kind of cooperation and cross fertilizationamong multiple communities that is necessary for addressing many grand challenges of science andsociety