Session Lead: Jeremy Testa
Co-lead(s): Lara Fowler, Jacob Carstensen, Lora Harris, Ann Swanson, Bo Gustaffson, Jesper Andersen, Alf Norkko, Denice Wardrop
Session Format:Oral presentation and workshop
Session Description:
Comparative ecology endeavors to synthesize information from multiple systems to discover emergent properties and principles, test paradigms, and provide insights valuable to both scientific understanding and management. Ecosystem-scale comparisons are urgently needed for coastal environments, where human impacts are typically more intense than in other marine environments. In contrast to academic-style analyses that may seek these cross-system perspectives, state and local agencies are often constrained to predict future responses to stressors such as nutrient additions, fishing pressure, or climate change from observations and models from the single system they are tasked with managing. The Baltic Sea and Chesapeake Bay are at similar inflection points in the management of pollutant loads that impact water quality and living resources. Both systems have also experienced shifting baselines as a consequence of climate change that complicate restoration trajectories and responses. Given the need for urgent and innovative solutions to improve our likelihood of success around restoration goals, the blending of comparative analysis and system-focused actions is now relevant.
Coastal ecosystems like the Baltic Sea and Chesapeake Bay are a product of their geography, hydrography, topography, climate, and human population pressures. Both systems are influenced by freshwater flow, nutrient loading, temperature, solar irradiance, salinity gradients, and wind are key external drivers. But the expression of these drivers in each system is modified by bathymetry, depth, and constrictions of the coastal and estuarine basins, and the anthropogenic (land use, political will) setting. Each system also has different impacts from fishing, urbanization, watershed land use, and recreation, and the biotic landscape including species introductions, extinctions, or extirpations, and the species composition of the system. The Baltic Sea and Chesapeake basins and their watersheds provide the context for understanding the impact of these forcing functions and filters. They also offer parallel frameworks for governance and management via the Chesapeake Bay Program and HELCOM.
This special session provides the opportunity for an interactive and facilitated sharing of similarities and differences between the Baltic and Chesapeake. Topics of interest from both systems are encouraged around five major topics; Policy measures to incentivize or regulate pollutant loads or their mitigation; Climate interactions that complicate ecosystem response (in watershed or receiving waters); Water quality outcomes (hypoxia, chlorophyll-a, etc); Living Resource outcomes (SAV, fish); Sea-based measures to reduce eutrophication and enhance ecosystem restoration. Comparisons within and among these topics can lead to greater perspective, insight, and development of management and policy structures that are urgently needed for conservation and restoration in each system.
Presenters:
Jacob Carstensen – Integrating science and marine management – a Danish historical perspective
Jesper Andersen – The HEAT is on: a story on the development and application of the HELCOM Eutrophication Assessment Tool
Donald Boesch – Outcomes, obstacles and opportunities in reducing agricultural nutrient loads for the Baltic Sea and Chesapeake Bay
Elin Almroth-Rosell – Model study of sea-based restauration in the Baltic Sea with forced vertical water exchange
Bo Gustafsson – Eutrophication management of the Baltic Sea – success in avoiding disaster?
Kalle Olli – Predictable phytoplankton diversity and functioning along the salinity continua of the Chesapeake Bay and the Baltic Sea – a cross-ecosystem comparison