Foresight Workshop

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.

Application/Registration Deadline of the preliminary online meeting: 10 May 2021

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.

Due to ongoing travel restrictions, the organisers have decided to delay this workshop until May, 2022. Microscale Ocean Biophysics fosters relaxed face-to-face interactions in order to promote a free-flowing exchange of ideas and as such the organisers believe it is worth delaying. The venue will remain the same and further updates will be announced as the rescheduled workshop takes shape.

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.

Activity Update

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.