HYPER
HYPoxia mitigation for Baltic Sea Ecosystem Restoration
Begin date 1.1.2009
End date 31.12.2011
Grant: 1996 981€
Hypoxia in the Baltic Sea has
become more frequent and widespread over the last century due to increased
nutrient inputs from land and atmosphere. Sediments and the benthic faunal
community play an important role for recycling nutrients, and the development
of hypoxia may occur as cascading regime shifts leading to further
deterioration of ecosystem health. Our present knowledge on processes leading
to hypoxia is fragmented and discipline-specific, with strong repercussions for
accurately computing nutrient reductions needed to restore the Baltic Sea.
HYPER will synthesise this knowledge at an ecosystem scale and establish a
holistic scientific understanding of the mechanisms leading to hypoxia and
associated effects on benthic fauna.
To achieve this HYPER will quantify
nutrient feedback rates from the sediments over gradients of salinity,
temperature and benthic community structure. HYPER will describe the temporal
and spatial variability of these processes within the entire Baltic Sea and use
this information for improving existing models describing the hydrodynamics and
biogeochemistry. Required nutrient reductions to maintain a healthy ecosystem
will be estimated taking future climate changes into account.
The project will combine field and experimental work into a modelling framework for nutrient management via the Baltic Nest Institute. The project is carried out at 11 institutes covering 6 countries around the Baltic Sea.
Keywords
Eutrophication, biogeochemistry, sediments, benthic fauna, ecosystem modelling
List of Participants and Principal Scientists
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National Environmental Research Institute, University of Aarhus, Denmark |
Jacob Carstensen (Coordinator) |
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Finnish Environment Institute, Finland |
Alf Norkko |
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University of Helsinki, Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences, Finland |
Jorma Kuparinen |
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Environmental and Marine Biology, Åbo Akademi University, Finland |
Erik Bonsdorff |
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Lund University, Sweden |
Daniel Conley |
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Zoological Institute of the Russian academy of sciences, Russia |
Alexey Maximov |
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Department of Earth Sciences – Geochemistry, Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University, The Netherlands |
Caroline Slomp |
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Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research, Germany |
Maren Voss |
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University of Gdansk, Poland |
Urszula Janas |
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Stockholm University, Sweden |
Fredrik Wulff |