An organizational meeting on the project ‘Preparatory Phase for the Pan-European Research Infrastructure – The International Centre for Advanced Studies on River-Sea Systems (DANUBIUS-RI)’ under Horizon 2020 programme was held in Bucharest (Romania) on 12-13 December 2016.

On part of Odessa State Environmental University, the meeting was attended by Prof. Mykola A. Berlinskyi, Head of the Department of Oceanography and Marine Environmental Management, Prof. Valerii M. Khokhlov, Vice-Rector for Teaching Methods and Systems, and Inna A. Khomenko, Assoc. Prof. of the Department of Meteorology and Climatology.

The project aims to raise DANUBIUS-RI (International Centre for Advanced Studies on River-Sea Systems) to the legal, financial and technical maturity required for successful implementation and development. DANUBIUS-RI is a pan-European distributed research infrastructure (RI) building on existing expertise to support interdisciplinary research on river-sea (RS) systems, spanning the environmental, social and economic sciences. It will provide access to a range of RS systems, facilities and expertise, a ‘one-stop shop’ for knowledge exchange, access to harmonised data, and a platform for interdisciplinary research, education and training.

The Project Consortium was presented by 29 universities from 15 European countries. The participants discussed the draft agreement, the main and intermediate objectives of the project, and drawn up a tentative schedule for the main stages etc.