EU to fund new marine ecosystem studies
The European Commission has announced that it will fund two new projects investigating ecosystems in the North Atlantic.
The commission is allocating €19m in funding to the two projects, with the aim of finding ways to exploit resources from the North Atlantic sea, while maintaining existing protections on wildlife and ecosystems that exist there.
ATLAS will serve to study how ecosystems function and connect to each other, and how resource exploitation, among other factors, affects their operation, through the development of new predictive models. These models will also be used to identify key areas of marine genetic resources, assessing their potential for exploitation under the EU’s blue growth strategy, and offer new insights into the biodiversity of various marine ecosystems. The study is being co-ordinated by Heriot‐Watt University in Edinburgh, UK.
The SponGES project has a similar remit, but with a different focus; it will look more specifically at sponge grounds, which are among the most diverse and vulnerable ecosystems in the North Atlantic. Very little research attention and few conservation efforts have been directed towards sponge habitats, but they are now seen as a key facet of the EU Maritime Strategy for the Atlantic Ocean Area, with a combination of resource management and conservation being crucial to the strategy moving forwards.
The new projects were funded under the first call for proposals for the EU programme on improving the preservation and sustainable exploitation of Atlantic marine ecosystems. The announcement follows a report that 47 projects have received funding under Horizon 2020’s SME Instrument.
