Description: A comprehensive understanding of the deep-sea environment and mining’s likely impacts is necessary to assess whether and under what conditions deep-seabed mining operations comply with the International Seabed Authority’s obligations to prevent ‘serious harm’ and ensure the ‘effective protection of the marine environment from harmful effects’ in accordance with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. A synthesis of the peer-reviewed literature and consultations with deep-seabed mining stakeholders revealed that, despite an increase in deep-sea research, there are few categories of publicly available scientific knowledge comprehensive enough to enable evidence-based decision-making regarding environmental management, including whether to proceed with mining in regions where exploration contracts have been granted by the International Seabed Authority. Further information on deep-sea environmental baselines and mining impacts is critical for this emerging industry. Closing the scientific gaps related to deep-seabed mining is a monumental task that is essential to fulfilling the overarching obligation to prevent serious harm and ensure effective protection, and will require clear direction, substantial resources, and robust coordination and collaboration. Based on the information gathered, we propose a potential high-level road map of activities that could stimulate a much-needed discussion on the steps that should be taken to close key scientific gaps before any exploitation is considered. These steps include the definition of environmental goals and objectives, the establishment of an international research agenda to generate new deep-sea environmental, biological, and ecological information, and the synthesis of data that already exist.

Description: Food webs are central entities mediating processes and external pressures in marine ecosystems. They are essential to understand and predict ecosystem dynamics and provision of ecosystem services. Paradoxically, utilization of food web knowledge in marine environmental conservation and resource management is limited. To better understand the use of knowledge and barriers to incorporation in management, we assess its application related to the management of eutrophication, chemical contamination, fish stocks, and non-indigenous species. We focus on the Baltic, a severely impacted, but also intensely studied and actively managed semi-enclosed sea. Our assessment shows food web processes playing a central role in all four areas, but application varies strongly, from formalized integration in management decisions, to support in selecting indicators and setting threshold values, to informal knowledge explaining ecosystem dynamics and management performance. Barriers for integration are complexity of involved ecological processes and that management frameworks are not designed to handle such information. We provide a categorization of the multi-faceted uses of food web knowledge and benefits of future incorporation in management, especially moving towards ecosystem-based approaches as guiding principle in present marine policies and directives. We close with perspectives on research needs to support this move considering global and regional change.

Description: Joint IAMSLIC/EURASLIC Conference held 14-19 October, 2001 at Brest, France

Description: Contains various examples and applications of visual data exploration and computational approaches. Includes a framework and its application for the evaluation of the success of research projects Provides in depth examples of SMART monitoring and data FAIRness

Description: Commercially exploited stocks that have experienced declines in population abundance have responded by altering life history traits of growth and maturation. Cod is not only becoming mature at an earlier age but also, the majority of the stock comprises fishes with no previous spawning experience. Actual fisheries management does not take in account qualitative differences within the spawning stock. If the stock responds to continued exploitation by shifting maturity to an earlier stage, fish will spawn at smaller sizes. They will produce smaller eggs, and consequently small and less viable larvae, so that the contribution to the spawning stock biomass will be less than expected. There are many advantages for delaying maturation: Larger and heavier fish will be better conditioned for spawning, have higher fecundity and larger eggs that are more viable. Harvesting at delayed recruitment enables the stock to maintain a larger SSB with an expanded age structure while supporting a sustainable fishery.

Description: An annotated checklist of the sharks and rays of the South China Sea is described, together with some global statistics on the status and use of elasmobranchs. For each of the 156 recorded species, the checklist contains scientific names, synonyms, common names, global distribution, distribution in the area, status of threat, human uses, key references on taxonomy, identification, reproduction, population dynamics, and a list of people who have contributed information. The checklist is a direct printout from FishBase, a global database on finfish, developed at ICLARM in collaboration with FAO, the California Academy of Sciences, and many other partners, and supported by the European Commission (see www.fishbase.org). The goal of FishBase is to further the conservation and sustainable use of fish by bringing together the knowledge of taxonomists, fisheries experts, and conservationists, providing tools for analysing and updating this knowledge, and making it available to concerned people. How a closer link between FishBase, taxonomists and country experts can benefit the specialists, as well as elasmobranch conservation, is discussed

Description: Reconstructions of global hydroclimate during the Common Era (CE; the past ∼2000 years) are important for providing context for current and future global environmental change. Stable isotope ratios in water are quantitative indicators of hydroclimate on regional to global scales, and these signals are encoded in a wide range of natural geologic archives. Here we present the Iso2k database, a global compilation of previously published datasets from a variety of natural archives that record the stable oxygen (δ18O) or hydrogen (δ2H) isotopic compositions of environmental waters, which reflect hydroclimate changes over the CE. The Iso2k database contains 759 isotope records from the terrestrial and marine realms, including glacier and ground ice (210); speleothems (68); corals, sclerosponges, and mollusks (143); wood (81); lake sediments and other terrestrial sediments (e.g., loess) (158); and marine sediments (99). Individual datasets have temporal resolutions ranging from sub-annual to centennial and include chronological data where available. A fundamental feature of the database is its comprehensive metadata, which will assist both experts and nonexperts in the interpretation of each record and in data synthesis. Key metadata fields have standardized vocabularies to facilitate comparisons across diverse archives and with climate-model-simulated fields. This is the first global-scale collection of water isotope proxy records from multiple types of geological and biological archives. It is suitable for evaluating hydroclimate processes through time and space using large-scale synthesis, model–data intercomparison and (paleo)data assimilation. The Iso2k database is available for download at https://doi.org/10.25921/57j8-vs18 (Konecky and McKay, 2020) and is also accessible via the NOAA/WDS Paleo Data landing page: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/study/29593 (last access: 30 July 2020).

Description: Highlights • Subaqueous spreading occurs on gently inclined surfaces (〈3°). • Gliding planes could be clays or sandy materials undergoing loss of strength. • It is documented on some of the largest marine landslides. • SubSpread Database includes 32 case studies. • Contourite and glaciogenic deposits represent often the slipping surfaces. Abstract Subaqueous spreading, a type of extensional mass transport that is characterized by a ridge and trough morphology, has been documented globally but is poorly understood. Subaqueous spreading is observed on gently inclined surfaces (typically 〈3°) when sediment bodies experience a sudden reduction of shear strength along their basal plane during clay softening or liquefaction of sands or silty sand sediment. Historically, spreading has been associated with very large landslides, but many unknown aspects of these mass movements have yet to be clarified. Does spreading influences the large catastrophic failure? What are the sedimentological and morphological aspects that contribute in initiating this process? These are some of the research questions that spurred the present work. Here, we introduce a database that incorporates information from thirty-two case studies, and use this to provide key insights into the sedimentary and morphological aspects of subaqueous spreading that will assist in the identification of spreading elsewhere. We find that subaqueous spreading is most common along passive glacial margins, but is also observed along active margins. The occurrence of contourites interlayered with glaciogenic deposits is, in most cases, associated with landslides (or landslide complexes) with spreading morphology. The database shows that seismic loading is commonly suggested to be the dominant trigger mechanism, although more geotechnical observations and modelling analysis would be needed to support this conclusion. We compare subaqueous spreading with terrestrial spreading, in particular to earthquake-related lateral spreading and clay landslides. We find that subaqueous spreading shares the same driving processes and potentially also some of the trigger mechanisms that are associated with the terrestrial spreading cases. Future work will be required to address the association between spreading and its occurrence on some of the largest landslides on Earth, its development mechanism, and its potential hazard implications.