The ecosystem service of carbon sequestration and storage provided by the marine system is of growing importance in the mitigation of climate change. Blue carbon (BC) habitats and offshore sediments can act as carbon stores and sinks and hence their protection or restoration may act as significant nature-based solution (NBS).
The Mediterranean Sea is a hot spot for marine biodiversity. Despite covering less than 1% of the world’s oceans it hosts about 10% of marine species and contains a high percentage (25-30%) of endemic species. Mediterranean marine ecosystems support the development of coastal and national wide socio-economic activities including food provision, coastal protection and tourism. Unfortunately, the Mediterranean region is also considered a climate change hotspot, where the respective impacts of warming are very pronounced and relatively well documented.
In Mediterranean coastal areas, a common side effect of overfishing is a trophic cascade leading to sea urchin outbreaks. Uncontrolled by predators such as seabream, sea urchins overgraze marine forests, creating barrens - large unproductive areas of bare rock hosting very low biodiversity. This process negatively affects biodiversity and ecosystem services, and leads to a loss of nursery areas for commercially important fish. While certain solutions (e.g.
Recent consistent and coordinated scientific efforts to combine molecular microbial observations with trace metal biogeochemistry have demonstrated the potential to deepen our knowledge of environmental controls on functional diversity and its influence on community composition. Progress in this research area is likely to be enhanced by wider application of further disciplines such as proteomics and metabolomics to studies of microbial function in the ocean.
The foresight workshop CommonConcept will advance approaches to support inter- and transdisciplinary science via qualitative conceptual models to inform IEA throughout European seas and beyond. In doing so, the organisers aim to create good practice guidelines for coherent conceptual mapping for IEAs, through scoping participant needs, skill sharing, and knowledge transfer.
This interdisciplinary foresight workshop will focus on the biophysics of microscale marine processes, i.e., how small-scale interactions between marine microorganisms and their physico-chemical environment overwhelmingly govern global ocean processes. If we are to advance our understanding of aquatic ecosystems, we need to replace current statistical and heuristic descriptions with a mechanistic understanding of the component processes. Ecosystem structure and function ultimately depend on interactions at the level of individual organism.
The EuroMarine foresight workshop 3DSeaFor: Developing Technology and Methods for the Precise Investigation of Marine Animal forest 3D-Structural Complexity will hold a one-day online videoconference on 21 May in order to begin discussions on topics which will comprise the Foresight Workshop in the autumn of 2020.
Due to impediments caused by Covid-19, the organisers have made some adjustments to the scheduling of this workshop:
Marine coastal areas host highly productive ecosystems that are threatened by the high rate of urban development in these areas and associated stressors affecting ecosystem processes. An integrated and effective assessment of the state of marine coastal ecosystems must rely on the knowledge of all human pressures at different levels of biological organization. This includes microbiomes, which have been re-evaluated as a ‘bank of hidden biodiversity’, with fundamental, albeit still unknown, functional potential capable of opening up new frontiers in scientific knowledge.
Due to impacts from the Covid-19 pandemic, including the postponement of the CECE2020/ISFE event around which this activity was originally planned, MODEL-EDC has been further postponed until September 2021. The current dates listed above are provisional - when the dates have been finalised this page will be updated.
