Habitat Dynamics at the Coast-Catchment Interface
Synthesis Results

1. Introduction

Fund attribution for ELOISE research projects has occurred largely on the basis of scientific quality (e.g. Herman et al., 2004), and hence the distribution of research effort has been unequally distributed over coastal habitats (Table 1(a)).

Table 1(a). Distribution of ELOISE research projects over coastal habitat types. The survey is based on an analysis of research objectives and published papers available from the ELOISE website database. ELOISE projects are represented by their acronym. A breakdown is attempted regarding the type of contribution made. Projects may have multiple entries, hence cross-tabulations do not add up. For some of these projects at least one key reference is presented in References 2.

Note: several projects have not had a focus on a particular habitat. Often, this was because the project scale was extensive and reached at or beyond the catchment scale of a regional sea, such as occurred in POPCYCLING, EUROCAT, DANUBS. Sometimes these have been listed under the pelagic, since a model or assessment of the open water food web was involved. Other projects that did not allow a straightforward linkage to a particular coastal habitat were: RANR, TOROS, MAMCS, ANICE, MOE, SUBGATE, BASIS, BEAM, CHABADA, CLICOFI, COMET, DELOS, HUMOR, INCA, OROMA, STREAMES. See also Herman et al (2004) for reference to projects that appear to be thematic outliers.

Considerable advances have been made in understanding biogeochemical fluxes of pelagic and coupled benthic-pelagic ecosystem complexes, i.e. dynamics occurring at shorter time scales such as within seasons (see Herman et al., 2004). Also, our understanding of catchment-coast interactions has greatly improved (e.g.Behrendt et al., 2002, Lancelot et al., 2002). This has often involved the comparison of longer-term time scales, and has, for example, led to the observation that nutrient loading to several of our northern seas has dropped over the last decade, in part because of policy implementation, and in part because of major political changes in central and eastern Europe. Spatial scale, however, of the biogeochemical studies was often small, i.e. a few sampling sites in a habitat, whereas that of the catchment-coast work by nature was quite large (at 100s of km of a catchment-sea complex). Management at the habitat-scale, thus, may well require both up-scaling as well as down-scaling of research findings, probably not a trivial task. Furthermore, the explicit connection to societal and socio-economic change has only been made in projects operating at the larger, catchment scale (such as EROS, BBCS, EUROCAT and DANUBS).