Marginal Seas – Humans and Environment
A new working group in Baltic Earth
Background and Objective
As highly sensitive areas of the ocean, marginal seas are particularly exposed to the pressures of climate change but also to anthropogenic impacts due to increased economic use of the seas, their coasts and drainage areas. This makes it all the more important to protect these fragile ecosystems and habitats, while ensuring the sustainable use of the valuable marine resources. These goals require new holistic approaches which comprehensively describe the functioning and management of coastal, marine and drainage areas. However, a general knowledge gap exists between society's demand for management strategies on the one side and cause-effect relationships of (controlling) drivers and environmental (tunable) marginal seas’ parameters on the other side. This gap can be closed by considering not only solutions for individual marginal seas but rather by generalization of individual marginal seas diversity that support the development of standardized concepts for sustainable management. The Baltic Sea is one of the best studied marginal seas, rich in prehistorical and historical data, unique oceanographic, hydrological and meteorological monitoring surveys over decades documented in comprehensive publications such as the BACC reports and the BEAR report. These data sets and the broadly discussed scientific background allow the comparison with marginal seas worldwide as base for the development of a marginal seas classification (taxonomic) system that support generalizing concepts for sustainable management. The promising course and the committed discussions of Session G "Comparing marginal seas worldwide" at the 5th Baltic Earth Conference, June 13-17, 2924, held at Jurmala, Latvia, did lead to the establishment of a Baltic Earth Working Group Marginal Seas – Humans and Environment to promote comparisons of marginal seas worldwide in the view of sustainability.
Description of tasks (or Terms of Reference)
The working group will contribute to a taxonomy of marginal seas considering the interrelation of climate, geo-, eco- and socioeconomic system as drivers of marginal seas environmental change. The spatial framework is set by the shelf seas, their coastal zones and drainage areas. The time frame is determined by the last glacial cycle, but especially the postglacial time – the period of human-nature interaction. Data to be considered range from local and regional monitoring programs (sometimes real-time data registrations) to global satellite observations. For long-term development (trends) of the human-nature relationship proxy data from natural archives are to be deciphered by transfer-functions. In addition to numerical functional models, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) methods are available for the complex evaluation and interpretation of this data.
By workshops, topical sessions at scientific conferences and publications scientific results will be discussed and introduced to the public.
The term of the first activity plan will be set to 2 years. A first online meeting will be held after the establishment of the group at the beginning of the academic year 2024-2025 to elaborate a work program subdivided into annual activity plans. After the first year the group’s achievements will be reviewed in order to adjust the plan.
The working group is not only open to the Baltic Earth community, but also to scientists from overseas to foster global comparative studies. Young scientists and students are particularly welcome to join.
Scientists and students interested to join the Baltic Earth Marginal Seas Working Group, please contact Prof. Dr. Jan Harff: jan.harff@io-warnemuende.de
Members of the Working Group (status Sept 30, 2024)
Peter Arlinghaus, Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon Geesthacht, Germany
Helge Arz, Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde, Germany
Hayley Cawthra, Council for Geoscience, Cape Town & Nelson Mandela University Cape Town, South Africa
Peter Clift, London, University College London, UK
Joanna Dudzinska-Nowak, University of Szczecin, Poland
Erich Fisher, Universidade do Algarve, Faro, Portugal
Gary Greene, San Jose State University, Orcas Island & University of Washington, Seattle, USA
Matthias Gröger, Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde, Germany
Jan Harff, University of Szczecin, Poland
Karol Kulinski, Institute of Oceanology PAN, Sopot, Poland
Markus Meier, Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde, Germany
Kai Myrberg, SYKE Finnish Environment Institute Helsinki, Finland
Kevin Parnell, Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia
Markus Reckermann, Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon Geesthacht, Germany
Hans von Storch, Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon Geesthacht, Germany
Ralf Weisse, Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon Geesthacht, Germany
Jinpeng Zhang, Guangzhou Marine Geological Suvey – China Geological Suryey, China