From Wildfire to Waves: A Hackathon Story
Duh duh duhh… duh duh duh-duhh…
Duh duh duhh… duh duhh…
That’s how it started.
Not with code or datasets.
With a riff. An idea. A question: What are the impacts of wildfires to the sea?
At Open Sea Lab 4.0 (March 25-26, 2025), we came together as Digital Lighthouse—a crew of scientists, technologists, and storytellers—united by a shared concern: that in Greece, fire season is no longer a warning. It’s a rhythm. A constant. An expectation.
But while the flames rage on land, their impact doesn’t stop at the shoreline. Smoke travels. Ash settles. Nutrients and pollutants run off into our seas, silently altering water chemistry and disrupting life below the surface. We’ve seen this play out across the globe—in California, the South China Sea, the Western Pacific. But here, in the Mediterranean? We’re still flying blind. The tools to assess that impact don’t exist.
So we built one.
Smoke on the Water is a prototype that traces the invisible threads between wildfire and marine disruption. Using datasets from EMODnet and Copernicus, we tapped into the power of the European Digital Twin of the Ocean, layering in-situ measurements from chemistry, physics, seabed habitats, and human activity with satellite data on wind and fire. Our focus? Posidonia oceanica and Marine Protected Areas—the quiet lungs of the Mediterranean, often the first to feel the pressure, but the last to be heard.
We built the foundation for an AI-ready model to help researchers, conservationists, marine managers, and policymakers understand the ripple effects before the damage is done. A lifeline for marine ecosystems.
And guess what?
We won first place.
But honestly, the best part? The team.
Here’s the band behind the music:
🐙 Eleana Touloupaki – Our resident marine scientist and walking encyclopedia. If something lived in the sea, Eleana knew about it, had probably tagged it, and definitely had a spreadsheet on it.
📊 Konstantina Stergiou – The brilliant bridge between data and biology. A dual-background powerhouse who could wrangle a dataset and explain it in Greek and Python.
🗺️ Jan Meischner – Marine data scientist and the map overlay whisperer. The kind of person who hears “multi-dimensional geospatial interpolation” and smiles.
🦦 Sol Milne – Conservation Ph.D. and insight machine. Sol had the uncanny ability to see connections no one else saw—usually while making us laugh.
🌀 Symeon Nasras – Our geologist oceanographer / hydrographer whiz with calm energy and big brainwaves. Symeon made the complex understandable—and somehow cool.
⚙️ Fotis Zapantis – The conservationist engineer who kept us grounded (and focused on Posidonia). When we wandered into the data jungle, Fotis pulled us back to the seagrass.
🎤 Jenny Ioannou (that’s me) – Not a scientist, but the glue that held it together. I asked the “dumb” questions, told the story, and made sure our vision could be understood beyond the hackathon.
Together, we built something that felt more like a mission than a model.
We are Digital Lighthouse. And this is Smoke on the Water.
See you where the land ends.
🌊 Huge thanks to the Open Sea Lab 4.0 organizers, mentors, and fellow teams for creating such an inspiring, generous space to explore, imagine, and build. We’re grateful—and already dreaming about what comes next. Special thanks to Artemis Samothrakis for the video footage.
