Three days to help save our coastal habitats
A global gathering of marine scientists has set a three-day symposium to work out how we can maximise the many life and planet protecting services we as humans benefit from our coastal habitats
Meeting AnnouncementA global gathering of marine scientists has set a three-day symposium to work out how we can maximise the many life and planet protecting services we as humans benefit from our coastal habitats.
The loss of biodiversity and effects of climate change are impacting the health of the whole planet. Climate change, pollution, overfishing and shipping are just some of the issues that have led to a worrying decline in the health of the seas that surround us.
On 22 November scientists will gather at an especially convened meeting in London, brought together by the University of Portsmouth and Zoological Society London to take a new seascape approach to restoring our coastal resources and habitats.
For the first two days the experts working in restoration and research from different coastal habitats will share knowledge and expertise and to create a holistic picture of the situation, joining the dots between shared challenges and novel research findings. On the third day scientists will bring together the evidence for how habitats are connected and what benefits this brings to solving the biodiversity and climate crisis. Their findings and possible solutions will be published in an open access paper.
Conference organiser, Dr Joanne Preston from the School of Biological Science at the University of Portsmouth, says: “The aim is to supercharge coastal restoration across temperate regions. By bringing together these experts we hope to move current conversations away from single species restoration. By taking a systems level approach that considers all the interactions and feedbacks that occur between healthy coastal habitats, we can move towards a seascape approach to nature restoration.
“For total habitat restoration we need to work collaboratively and think about the whole system as one seascape. Only then, can we start to understand more about the connectivity between different habitats and species such as saltmarsh, oysters, seagrass and kelp – all of which are in critical decline, and find ways to restore the entire system rather than single entities.”
The event will bring experts together to unlock the evidence needed to drive a joined-up approach to habitat restoration. This is important because in marine environments everything is connected by the 3-dimensional body of seawater. The connectivity of these habitats is vital for restoring food webs and repairing degraded and fragmented individual habits.
Coastal environments have been badly damaged with nearly all oyster reefs destroyed and over half the seagrass and saltmarsh beds gone. Experts hope that by trying to understand how each environment is connected they can plan to improve resilience. As well as individual habitats recovering there will be a knock-on benefit to the entire seascape - such as increasing fish populations, nitrate removal, biodiversity, carbon drawdown, and a decrease in erosion.
The Symposium is being held in person at the Zoological Society London on 22-24 November 2022.
More details can be found here.
Satellites cast critical eye on coastal
dead zones
IMAGE: ALGAE BLOOM ON A CHINESE BEACH IS REPRESENTATIVE OF THE EXPANSIVE ALGAE BLOOMS WHICH ULTIMATELY LEACH OXYGEN FROM THE WATER, CREATING DEAD ZONES. view more
CREDIT: RUISHAN CHEN, MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
A dead zone in the ocean is as bad as it sounds. Being clueless about dead zones scope and path is worse. Scientists at Michigan State University (MSU) have discovered a birds-eye method to predict where, when and how long dead zones persist across large coastal regions.
“Understanding where these dead zones are and how they may change over time is the first crucial step to mitigating these critical problems. But it is not easy by using traditional methods, especially for large-scale monitoring efforts,” said Yingjie Li, who did the work while a PhD student at MSU’s Center for System Integration and Sustainability (CSIS). He currently is a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University.Dead zones – technically known as hypoxia -- are water bodies degraded to the point where aquatic life cannot survive because of low oxygen levels. They’re a problem mainly in coastal areas where fertilizer runoff feeds algae blooms, which then die, sink to the water’s bottom and decay. That decay eats up oxygen dissolved in the water, suffocating living life, such as fish and other organisms that make up vibrant living waters.
Dead zones can be hard to identify and track and usually have been observed by water samples. But as reported in Remote Sensing of the Environment, scientists have figure out a novel way to use satellite views to understand what’s happening deep below the ocean’s surface. They used the Gulf of Mexico at the mouth of the Mississippi River as a demonstration site.
The group supplemented data from water sampling with different ways to use satellite views over time. In addition to predicting the size of hypoxic zones, the study provides additional information on where, when, and how long hypoxic zones persist with greater details and enables modeling hypoxic zones at near-real-time.
Since 1995, at least 500 coastal dead zones have been reported near coasts covering a combined area larger than the United Kingdom, endangering fisheries, recreation and the overall health of the seas. Climate change is likely to exacerbate hypoxia.
The group notes the need to initiate a global coast observatory network to synthesize and share data for better understanding, predicting and communicating the changing coasts. Currently, such data is difficulty to come by. And the stakes are higher as fertilizer applied in a field can become run off in one part of a body of water miles away. The group points out the telecoupling framework, which enables understanding human and natural interactions near and far, would be useful to see the big picture of a problem.
“Damages to our coastal waters are a telecoupling problem that spans far beyond the dead zones – distant places that apply excessive fertilizers for food production and even more distant places that demand food. Thus, it’s critical we take a holistic view while employing new methods to gain a true understanding,” said Jianguo “Jack” Liu, MSU Rachel Carson Chair in Sustainability and CSIS director.
Besides, Li and Liu, “Satellite prediction of coastal hypoxia in the northern Gulf of Mexico” was written by Drs. Samuel Robinson and Lan Nguyen from the University of Calgary. The work was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Environmental Science and Policy Summer Research Fellowship.
This map shows hypoxia recurrence measured by the percentage of time with hypoxia detected during the summertime in 2014.
CREDIT
Michigan State University Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability.
JOURNAL
Remote Sensing of Environment
ARTICLE TITLE
Remote Sensing of Environment 284 (2023) 113346 Available online 16 November 2022 0034-4257/© 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Satellite prediction of coastal hypoxia in the northern Gulf of Mexico
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