Project Profile: OceanFrontCHANGE
Managing Ocean Front Ecosystems for Climate Change
Who?
| Principal Investigators: | Lee Hannah, Conservation International, United States |
| Partners: | Boris Dewitte, Institut de Recherche pour le Dévelopment (IRD) Laboratoire d'Oceanographie Physique et Spatiale (LOPS), France Florian Diekert, Universitat Heidelberg, Germany Yonss Jean Saranga Jose, Universitat Heidelberg, Germany David Obura, Coastal Oceans Research and Development in the Indian Ocean (CORDIO) East Africa, Kenya Pierrick Penven, Institut de Recherche pour le Dévelopment (IRD) Laboratoire d'Oceanographie Physique et Spatiale (LOPS), France Jean-François Ternon, Institut de Recherche pour le Dévelopment (IRD) Laboratoire d'Oceanographie Physique et Spatiale (LOPS), France Paul Tuda, Universitat Heidelberg, Germany Rossi Vincent, Institut de Recherche pour le Dévelopment (IRD) Laboratoire d'Oceanographie Physique et Spatiale (LOPS), France |
| Sponsors: | National Research Agency, France Federal Ministry of Education and Research, Germany Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, Sweden/African countries National Science Foundation, United States |
What?
| Full Project Title: | Managing Ocean Front Ecosystems for Climate Change |
| Full Call Title: | Oceans2018 |
| Website: | https://www.awi.uni-heidelberg.de/professuren/ressourcen/oceanfrontchange_en.html |
Why?
| Project Objective: | Ocean fronts are meeting places of life in the oceans. Marine organisms from plankton to blue whales congregate at the interface of cooler and warmer waters, due to the prevalence of enhanced productivity at fronts. The technology for identifying ocean fronts is well-established, including mapping from remotely sensed SST and altimetry. However, the management of fronts is in its infancy, as is understanding how fronts will vary with climate change. This means that much of the information available about ocean fronts and their response to climate change is not available to managers making decisions about how to achieve local, regional, and national conservation and Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). The goal of this proposal is to provide marine planners and managers with physical and biological information critical to meeting these planning needs in marine conservation and sustainable fisheries. This project works with conservation and fishing stakeholders in the Mozambique Channel to design research about ocean fronts, their use by marine species and fisheries and how front variability will change in the future. We work with stakeholder communities to create conservation and sustainable fishing solutions for fronts. We use global remote sensing analysis to find other areas in which the conditions that make these solutions relevant apply. The outcomes of this project fill critical gaps in information identified by stakeholders and planners, helping them to meet individual and collective responsibilities relating to the nature of the ocean and its sustainable use as climate changes. We will provide this information globally for the tropics and in more detail for our focal region in the Mozambique Channel. This contribution comes at a critical time, as governments commit to Sustainable Development Goals, communities are struggling to understand how to adapt resource management to climate change and conservation groups look for ways to protect marine life at fronts that are moving in response to climate change. |
| Call Objective: | This CRA call aims to contribute to the overall challenge of ocean sustainability, using the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal #14 (Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development) as the overall framework. This call encourages global partnerships of academics and non-academics to address one or more of the following topics: 1) Pathways toward a sustainable and equitable use of oceans, 2) accounting for and minimizing impacts of global change. |
Where?
| Regions: | |
| Countries: | France, Germany, Kenya, United States of America (USA) |
When?
| Duration: | 36 |
| Call Date: | 29 October 2018 |
| Project Award Date: | 12 February 2020 |
