AI-Driven Unified Data Platform for Oceanographic Fisheries and Molecular Biodiversity Insights
Organization: Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES)
Category: Software | Theme: Renewable / Sustainable Energy

About CMLRE

CMLRE, Kochi, an attached office under the Ministry of Earth Sciences, plays a key role in organising and promoting ocean development activities in India, with a focus on mapping, assessing, and managing marine living resources in the Indian EEZ. The Marine Living Resources Programme supports ecosystem-based research and monitoring, aimed at sustainable utilisation of these resources through scientific surveys, environmental studies, and data-driven ecosystem modelling.

Background

India, with its vast coastline and rich marine biodiversity, relies heavily on the health of its ocean ecosystems for food security, climate regulation, and economic development. The Centre for Marine Living Resources and Ecology (CMLRE), under the Ministry of Earth Sciences, plays a pivotal role in collecting, managing, and analysing a broad spectrum of marine data to support sustainable ocean resource management.

Detailed description

CMLRE's datasets are diverse, complex, and multidisciplinary, including physical, chemical, and biological oceanography; fish abundance, species diversity, life history traits, and ecomorphology; fish taxonomy and otolith morphology; molecular biology data, including environmental DNA (eDNA) for species detection and biodiversity assessments. These datasets exist across various formats (structured, semi-structured, and unstructured), and are stored in siloed systems, making cross-domain integration, real-time visualization, and advanced analytics nearly impossible. This creates a major bottleneck for marine scientists, conservationists, and policymakers who need to make data-driven decisions for ecosystem conservation and fisheries management.

CMLRE seeks an AI-enabled, intelligent digital platform that can integrate heterogeneous and high-volume datasets from oceanography, taxonomy, morphology, and molecular biology into a single unified system. The platform should support automated data ingestion, standardisation, and metadata tagging using internationally accepted formats, enable cross-disciplinary correlation analysis to study how ocean parameters influence biodiversity, fish distribution, and ecosystem health, and incorporate interactive modules for otolith shape and morphometrics visualisation, taxonomic classification and species identification, and molecular and eDNA data storage/retrieval and species matching.

Why It Matters

This platform will serve as a national marine data backbone, empowering India's scientific community with a next-generation tool for holistic marine ecosystem assessment. It will improve the efficiency of marine biodiversity research, enhance real-time decision-making, and support blue economy initiatives by enabling sustainable fisheries and conservation planning through integrated data insights.

Expected Deliverables

• A robust, cloud-ready web platform prototype.
• Scalable backend architecture with modular data ingestion pipelines.
• Visualisation tools for oceanographic and biodiversity trends.
• Integrated modules for managing taxonomy, otolith morphology, and eDNA data.
• Well-documented APIs and user manuals for future adoption and scaling.