Published in Frontiers in Marine Science
Climate change predictions indicate global changes in salinity with negative implications for plankton food webs; an important baseline for functioning of marine ecosystems. Current understanding of how salinity change will impact plankton communities is mostly limited to the salinization of freshwater environments, with little known about the effe...
Published in Frontiers in Marine Science
Eutrophication is a process that results in excessive phytoplankton blooms, which sink to the sediment and enrich the organic matter (OM). This alters the available resources to benthic organisms and may have consequences for feeding ecology and reproduction strategies of marine populations. While effects of eutrophication on biodiversity are well ...
Published in Frontiers in Marine Science
This paper aims to quantify data uncertainties in marine microplastic measurements, including spatiotemporal sampling error and sample volume estimation error, identify impacts of varying mesh sizes, sampling and analysis methods, and evaluate consistency in multiple microplastic observation datasets. Twenty-seven datasets on surface marine micropl...
Published in Frontiers in Marine Science
Microplastic (MP) pollution is present in all aquatic environments and is gaining critical concern. We have conducted sea surface MP monitoring with a Manta trawl at 16 sampling stations in the eastern Baltic Sea in 2016–2020. The concentrations varied from 0.01 to 2.45 counts/m3 (0.002–0.43 counts/m2), and the mean was 0.49 counts/m3 (0.08 counts/...
Published in Frontiers in Marine Science
Ecosystems are simultaneously regulated by bottom-up (resources) and top-down forces (predators). However, because predator-prey interactions operate on spatial scales beyond the reach of manipulative experimentation, the actual roles of predators remain poorly understood. In ecosystems where predators are naturally absent, biological invasions pro...
Published in Frontiers in Earth Science
The water cycle of the Baltic Sea has been estimated from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) and the GRACE Follow-On satellite time-variable gravity measurements, and precipitation and evaporation from ERA5 atmospheric reanalysis data for the periods 06/2002 to 06/2017 and 06/2018 to 11/2021. On average, the Baltic Sea evaporates 1...
Published in Microbiome
Background For many environments, biome-specific microbial gene catalogues are being recovered using shotgun metagenomics followed by assembly and gene calling on the assembled contigs. The assembly is typically conducted either by individually assembling each sample or by co-assembling reads from all the samples. The co-assembly approach can poten...
Several hundred thousand tonnes of munitions containing chemical warfare agents (CWAs) are lying on the seafloor worldwide. CWAs have started leaking from corroded munitions, and their presence in the environment and in organisms inhabiting dump sites has been detected. The presence of CWAs in the water negatively affects fish, macrobenthos and fre...
Published in Molecular ecology
The green seaweed Ulva is a model system to study seaweed-bacteria interactions, but the impact of environmental drivers on the dynamics of these interactions is little understood. In this study, we investigated the stability and variability of the seaweed-associated bacteria across the Atlantic-Baltic Sea salinity gradient. We characterised the ba...
Published in European Transport Research Review
Objective This study aims to investigate the degree of concentration and the competitive positions of the Baltic cruise port network. Methods A set of 29 Baltic ports are analysed, market concentration is evaluated using the analytical technique of the Herfindahl–Hirschman index, and competitive positions are determined through portfolio analysis b...
