Marine monitoring in transition

Laura Uusitalo,
PhD, Leading Researcher,
Finnish Environment Institute,
Finland

Human activities both on land and at sea affect the marine ecosystems and drive them towards new states and configurations. Land use changes affect the release of nutrients and other substances to the seas. Climate change alters the temperature, seawater stratification, and rain patterns. Coastal developments change habitats, and introductions of new species on one hand and the exploitation of established species on the other hand change the interactions between species.

Marine environments support human societies by offering a multitude of ecosystem services from climate control and carbon sequestration to food provision and recreational, cultural, and spiritual values. The provision of these services depends on the biodiversity and the state of the marine environment. Therefore, societies have established legislation to ensure the protection and restoration of the marine environment, such as the Clean Water Act and Oceans Policy in the USA, the Oceans Acts of Canada and Australia, and the Water Framework Directive, the Marine Strategy Framework Directive, and the Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 of the European Union.

Effective protection and restoration of the seas require an understanding of the status and development trends of the ecosystem, which in turn requires monitoring. While the economic benefits of monitoring are hard to see directly, leading to attempts to save monitoring expenses, research has shown that monitoring costs are a minimal part of the management and that sufficient monitoring can help direct the use of resources in the most efficient way. Good information on the status of the environment will help focus the restoration measures where they are needed, and therefore help improve the status of the seas cost-efficiently and safeguard or restore the provision of the ecosystem services. Further, information gained from monitoring is needed to make informed decisions about permitting new activities on the coast and sea, and to create models of the marine environment that can be used for future projections and scenario evaluations.

Marine monitoring is in transition. Increased pressures threatening to change the marine ecosystems, together with the recognition of the human dependency on them, have created a need for more monitoring data both in terms of spatial and temporal coverage and for aspects of the ecosystem that have not been monitored before, such as contaminants, microplastics, food web functioning, and many aspects of biodiversity. Modern monitoring methods such as satellite imagery, automated monitoring stations, stable isotope and eDNA techniques, biomonitoring, and underwater imaging, together with machine learning and other new data analysis methods, offer the means to acquire and handle these data. Old monitoring methods can be complemented with and even replaced by these new methodologies to gather a wealth of data that can help us manage and protect the seas. Yet, dismantling the old, more traditional monitoring systems needs to be approached with caution. In the Baltic Sea, the international monitoring has been coordinated by the Baltic Marine Environment Protection Commission (HELCOM) since 1979, while some time series go back much further. Long, uninterrupted time series are priceless in helping to understand the changes of the ecosystem, a critical issue under the current, global changes.

The monitoring transition needs to be managed carefully. To be as useful as possible, monitoring data need to be comparable across time and geographical areas, meaning that the methods need to be standardized between different actors such as nations performing the monitoring in their parts of the sea. International coordination is needed to agree the new monitoring protocols to guarantee their comparability. Further, if the modern method aims to eventually replace an old monitoring method, there needs to be a thorough and proper, multi-year research programme to establish the correspondence and possible differences between the old and new results, so that the continuity of the time series will not be hampered by the change. This being taken care of, the technological improvements in monitoring and data analysis offer an unprecedented opportunity to increase our understanding about the marine ecosystems and their changes, and to ensure the well-being of both the seas and the human societies around them.

Expert article 3097

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