TransEurope Marinas welcomes senior researcher to lead innovative LandSeaLot initiative

14 May 2026

TransEurope Marinas is delighted to announce the appointment of Amina Kechuindi as Senior Researcher to support the association’s involvement in LandSeaLot, an EU-funded project working to enhance and improve how we observe the land-sea interface. During her one-year tenure, she will lead efforts to facilitate sustainable engagement with ocean science in marinas and assist with work in LandSeaLot Integration Labs (LILs): sites that are piloting new methods and collaborations for observing the land-sea interface across Europe.

An agricultural engineer specialising in fisheries and environmental science, Amina joins TransEurope with a unique multidisciplinary background, combining ecological monitoring with socio-economic studies to understand the relationship between marine environments and human activity. This experience, together with her work in environmental communication, is of particular value in translating scientific concepts into accessible guidance for the wider marina community.

Connecting Communities through Co-Design

Originally from Tunisia and currently based in Paris, Amina’s impressive language skills will enable her to conduct field work with marina managers of various nationalities, where a central focus over the next few months will be co-designing mutually beneficial ways for marinas to engage with coastal and marine science. This could involve connecting with regional experts and conservation projects to help interpret the dynamics, pressures and characteristics of the local waters, and providing water sports enthusiasts with the means to contribute useful data.

Work will also involve trialling the use of simple cost-effective sensors to observe water temperature and water quality, while planning resources to help marinas select future observation tools that best suit their facilities and preferences. Having coordinated projects, facilitated workshops, and worked with startups, institutions, NGOs, and local actors, Amina is appreciative that participatory science is easy to start but much harder to sustain over time. She approaches this work with a clear vision about the people-centric and contextualised nature of effective engagement systems.

Impact through Expertise and Collaboration

The Senior Researcher role in the Horizon Europe LandSeaLot project was particularly appealing to Amina, as she describes:

“This opportunity resonates with me because it directly connects my passion for ocean science with the need to bridge scientific observation and coastal communities. It reflects exactly the type of work I have been building toward: where research is not only about understanding marine systems, but also about making that knowledge meaningful, shared, and actionable for the people who live closest to them.”

TransEurope Marinas manager, Melanie Symes, added:

“This is set to have a considerable impact on how marinas, boaters, visitors and local residents relate to their marine environments and to the important work being done by scientists to understand related climate risks and human impacts. Most importantly, we hope to offer the means to take an active role in ocean stewardship.

We were lucky to receive a number of qualified applications for this role, but Amina stood out immediately due to her evident expertise and notably proactive attitude.

Many thanks to project partners Lucie Coquempot, Dr. Dominique Durand our association Chair, Maarten Desloovere for their support and dedication to this process.”

Amina will be joining the next TransEurope Marinas members’ meeting in July to present the project and discuss how marinas can get involved in this work.