A Case Study of Ecological Suitability of Mussel and Seaweed Cultivation using Bivariate Copula Functions

Aquaculture is gaining importance in the current context of continuous growth population as a source of (local) food resources and its potential of being combined with other uses at sea (e.g.: offshore energy production or tourism). Consequently, within the European Horizon 2020 project UNITED, the combination of mussel and seaweed cultivation...

EuroGOOS roadmap for operational coastal downstream services

The EuroGOOS Coastal working group examines the entire coastal value chain from coastal observations to services for coastal users. The main objective of the working group is to review the status quo, identify gaps and future steps needed to secure and improve the sustainability of the European coastal service provision. Within this framework,...

Assessing the Use of Sentinel-2 Data for Spatio-Temporal Upscaling of Flux Tower Gross Primary Productivity Measurements

The conservation, restoration and sustainable use of wetlands is the target of several international agreements, among which are the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Earth Observation (EO) technologies can assist national authorities in monitoring activities and the environmental status of wetlands to achieve these targets. In this study...

Coastal environmental and atmospheric data reduction in the Southern North Sea supporting ecological impact studies

Coastal climate impact studies make increasing use of multi-source and multi-dimensional atmospheric and environmental datasets to investigate relationships between climate signals and the ecological response. The large quantity of numerically simulated data may, however, include redundancy, multi-colinearity and excess information not relevant...

Historical and future naturalization of Magallana gigas in the Galician coast in a context of climate change

Magallana gigas is a naturalized species on the north coast of Galicia (Rías Altas, Northwest Iberian Peninsula), where it was unintentionally introduced. In recent decades, a greater abundance of M. gigas has been observed on the Galician coast, expanding towards the south, reaching the Artabro Gulf (Rías Centrales, NW Galician coast), probably...

Climate change induced trends and uncertainties in phytoplankton spring bloom dynamics

Spring phytoplankton blooms in the southern North Sea substantially contribute to annual primary production and largely influence food web dynamics. Studying long-term changes in spring bloom dynamics is therefore crucial for understanding future climate responses and predicting implications on the marine ecosystem. This paper aims to study...

Remote sensing-based automatic detection of shoreline position: A case study in apulia region

Remote sensing and satellite imagery have become commonplace in efforts to monitor and model various biological and physical characteristics of the Earth. The land/water interface is a continually evolving landscape of high scientific and societal interest, making the mapping and monitoring thereof particularly important. This paper aims at...

Integrating inland and coastal water quality data for actionable knowledge

Water quality measures for inland and coastal waters are available as discrete samples from professional and volunteer water quality monitoring programs and higher-frequency, near-continuous data from automated in situ sensors. Water quality parameters also are estimated from model outputs and remote sensing. The integration of these data,...

3D Ensemble Simulation of Seawater Temperature: An Application for Aquaculture Operations

During the past decades, the aquaculture industry has developed rapidly, due to drop in wild fish catch. Water quality variables play major role in aquaculture operations, specifically seawater temperature has major impact on the metabolism of the fish species and therefore on the growth rate too. Since the fish farming business relies on the...

A Bayesian stochastic generator to complement existing climate change scenarios: Supporting uncertainty quantification in marine and coastal ecosystems

Available climate change projections, which can be used for quantifying future changes in marine and coastal ecosystems, usually consist of a few scenarios. Studies addressing ecological impacts of climate change often make use of a low- (RCP2.6), moderate- (RCP4.5) or high climate scenario (RCP8.5), without taking into account further...

A Bayesian approach to ecosystem service trade-off analysis utilizing expert knowledge

The concept of ecosystem services is gaining attention in the context of sustainable resource management. However, it is inherently difficult to account for tangible and intangible services in a combined model. The aim of this study is to extend the definition of ecosystem service trade-offs by using Bayesian Networks to capture the...

A copula-based sensitivity analysis method and its application to a North Sea sediment transport model

This paper describes a novel sensitivity analysis method, able to handle dependency relationships between model parameters. The starting point is the popular Morris (1991) algorithm, which was initially devised under the assumption of parameter independence. This important limitation is tackled by allowing the user to incorporate dependency...

Use of multiway Partial Least Squares Regression (N-PLS) as model emulator to quantify climate change induced uncertainty in future marine chlorophyll-a concentrations

Traditionally, quantifying climate change induced uncertainty in ecological indicators requires stochastic simulation with a chain of physically-based models describing various processes such as hydrodynamics, waves, sediment transport and ecology. Such Monte Carlo based simulation on the entire model chain, especially with large sample size, is...

Integration of satellite remote sensing data in ecosystem modelling at local scales: Practices and trends

Spatiotemporal ecological modelling of terrestrial ecosystems relies on climatological and biophysical Earth observations. Due to their increasing availability, global coverage, frequent acquisition and high spatial resolution, satellite remote sensing (SRS) products are frequently integrated to in situ data in the development of ecosystem...

Monitoring biodiversity change through effective global coordination

The ability to monitor changes in biodiversity, and their societal impact, is critical to conserving species and managing ecosystems. While emerging technologies increase the breadth and reach of data acquisition, monitoring efforts are still spatially and temporally fragmented, and taxonomically biased. Appropriate long-term information...

The ensemble particle filter (EnPF) in rainfall-runoff models

Rainfall-runoff models play a very important role in flood forecasting. However, these models contain large uncertainties caused by errors in both the model itself and the input data. Data assimilation techniques are being used to reduce these uncertainties. The ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) and the particle filter (PF) both have their own...

Improving the operational forecasting system of the stratified flow in Osaka Bay using an ensemble Kalman filter–based steady state Kalman filter

Numerical models of a water system are always based on assumptions and simplifications that may result in errors in the model's predictions. Such errors can be reduced through the use of data assimilation and thus can significantly improve the success rate of the predictions and operational forecasts. The ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) is a...

Data assimilation in particle models for groundwater contamination