SEAMAN: Spatially resolved Ecosystem models and their Application to Marine MANagement (SEAMAN)
SEAMAN aims to improve ecosystem understanding and modelling and involves 6 institutes in 4 countries.
Objectives
The main objectives of the project are:
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To provide new knowledge for a better understanding of the functioning of the marine ecosystem and its spatial-temporal variations to address currently existing challenges in 3-d ecosystem models (e.g. calibration of primary production and regenerated production, trophic coupling).
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To develop new and advanced spatially explicit modelling tools capable to resolve the combined influence of multiple ecosystem drivers.
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To advance the 3-d modelling tools into suitable management instruments.
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To advance the understanding of climatic induced variations in habitats and their implications for fisheries management.
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To integrate state of the art understanding of bio-accumulation of pollutants (Brooks et al., 2012) and invasive species into coupled NPZD-fish models and to advance the knowledge base on the risk of spatial variations in exposure to pollutants by theoretical case study simulations.
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To provide a new data base on observational based primary production estimates, a new and expanded data base of phyto- and zooplankton size spectra data and a new database compiled from historic fish data and construction of seasonally resolved habitat maps.
Project Summary
SEAMAN is a project within the program SEAS-ERA in the EU FP7 ERA-NET Scheme aiming to strengthen the coordination of national and regional research programmes.The project brings together experts from different countries in Europe, focusing on different parts of the ecosystem from the physical environment, to plankton, fish, invasive species and pollutants. The collaboration allows to share forces and competences and avoids (uncontrolled) overlap in research foci while stimulating (controlled) complementary and parallel research. The work is aorgnized in 6 workpagages:
- WP1: Bottom up controls in marine ecosystems
- WP2: Fish behaviour in response to environmental controls
- WP3: Interactive coupling of fish and 3-d lower trophic level models
- WP4: Climate driven and human induced changes in species distribution
- WP5: Pollution and climate stress on fish
- WP6: New management tools, case study applications
