Project

Marine life makes a substantial contribution to the economy and society of Europe. VECTORS will elucidate the drivers, pressures and vectors that cause change in marine life, the mechanisms by which they do so, the impacts that they have on ecosystem structures and functioning, and on the economics of associated marine sectors and society. VECTORS will particularly focus on causes and consequences of invasive alien species, outbreak forming species, and changes in fish distribution and productivity. New and existing knowledge and insight will be synthesized and integrated to project changes in marine life, ecosystems and economies under future scenarios for adaptation and mitigation in the light of new technologies, fishing strategies and policy needs. VECTORS will evaluate current forms and mechanisms of marine governance in relation to the vectors of change. Based on its findings, VECTORS will provide solutions and tools for relevant stakeholders and policymakers, to be available for use during the lifetime of the project. The project will address a complex array of interests comprising areas of concern for marine life, biodiversity, sectoral interests, regional seas, and academic disciplines as well as the interests of stakeholders. VECTORS will ensure that the links and interactions between all these areas of interest are explored, explained, modeled and communicated effectively to the relevant stakeholders. The VECTORS consortium is extremely experienced and genuinely multidisciplinary. It includes a mixture of natural scientists with knowledge of socio-economic aspects, and social scientists (environmental economists, policy and governance analysts and environmental law specialists) with interests in natural system functioning.

For VECTORS, IFM researchers are focusing their research primarily on the Baltic and North Seas; theoretical work surrounds governance, stakeholder and sector interactions and input, and the cultural valuation of ecosystem services.

The core aim of the RESOCO is to build an interdisciplinary synthesis of up-to-date Nordic knowledge and best practices and set the stage for alternative solutions on how to effectively reconcile seal-fishery conflict in the Baltic Sea.

The overall objective of RESOCO is to propose pragmatic and regionally applicable measures which are acceptable to all key stakeholders involved in seal-fishery conflicts in the Baltic Sea. These measures include a mixture of technological tools and practices, management of seal populations, economic measures, and institutional and governance instruments.

The project applies a transdisciplinary approach, incorporating technological sciences, social sciences, economics, environmental psychology, and natural sciences. It supports participatory, coordinated and synergetic approaches for moving towards a more balanced situation in seal-fishery conflict.

The Baltic Sea Region Integrated Maritime Cultural Heritage Management (BalticRIM) is a 3-year project (2017-2020) led by State Archeology Department of Schleswig-Holstein, in Germany. It is part-funded by the Interreg BSR program under the ERDF.

The EU Mission ‘Restore our Ocean and Waters’ (Mission Ocean) aims at protecting and restoring the health of our ocean and waters through research and innovation, citizen engagement, and blue investments by 2030. The creation of the European Digital Twin Ocean (EU DTO) supports this mission as well as the key initiative of the European Commission, Destination Earth (DestinE), aiming at developing a highly accurate digital model of the Earth on a global scale to be able to monitor, simulate, and predict the interaction between natural phenomena and human activities. Addressing the Horizon Europe call HORIZON-MISS-2023-OCEAN-01-8, SEADITO focuses on the need for a targeted set of analytical methods and tools to support the development of the EU DTO including integrating social-ecological models in order to establish a comprehensive decision support platform. SEADITO aims at increasing transdisciplinary abilities of social-ecological models by updating and integrating them for improved Ecosystem-based Management, and a set of case studies in the Baltic Sea, the North Sea and the Mediterranean as well a Pan-European case study will provide the contexts for the multiactor processes identifying user needs, as well as co designing and testing components and services in the targeted user communities. The results will include sets of interoperable, spatial explicit, and DTO compliant social-ecological decision-support components based on FAIR principles (e.g. to be integrated with EDITO-Model Lab), as well as scalable and multi-level social-ecological models, integrated quantitative and qualitative social-ecological indicators, and workflows quantifying and integrating cultural and behavioural aspects. The components will be tested through an interactive spatial platform, the SEADITO Explorer equipped with visual demonstrators of socialecological models and a Scenario Toolkit (WIST). Learning materials will target young researchers, decision-makers, and the public.

The work package explores the application of the new developments in Natural Language Processing (NLP) to improve accident analysis completeness and predictability. The findings will be illustrated by analyzing ongoing safety challenges in constructing, operating, and maintaining energy hubs in the North and Baltic Seas. Energinet and its partners (research collaborators involved in development of the energy hubs) have suggested the analysis of diving and deck operations during the installation, maintenance, and repair of subsea cables and operations related to ship traffic.