Jana Woelfel

• Dr.
• Public Relations Officer for CDRmare at Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research

As accumulation zones, sandy beaches are temporal sinks for beach wrack and litter, both often seen as nuisances to tourists. Consequently, there is a need for beach management and an enhanced political interest to evaluate their ecosystem services. We applied a new online multidisciplinary assessment approach differentiating between the provision,...

The report covers main ecological aspects related to beach wrack ecology and beach management with focus on sandy beaches. The managed beaches had to fill the following criterias: 1) used for recreational purposes, 2) with dominance of sandy sediments, and 3) from where beach wrack is removed on regular basis. The ecological aspects of beach wrack...

This report is divided into three main sections: The first section offers brief insight into the current state of beach wrack practices and the beach wrack industry, and evolves into an elaboration on value and change drivers. The second section brings focus to the CONTRA case studies and the treatment options that were researched, with an intro...

This report No 5.1 is one of the main outputs of the Project CONTRA (2019–2021), which was fulfilled within the Program Interreg Baltic Sea Region. The report was prepared within the Work Package 5 “Innovative technologies for beach wrack handling and toolkit” by experts from CONTRA Project Partners. It represents the results obtained in the six c...

Benthic diatom communities dominate sheltered shallow inner coastal waters of the atidal Southern Baltic Sea. However, their photosynthetic oxygen production and respiratory oxygen consumption is rarely evaluated. In the Baltic Sea carbon budget benthic diatom communities are often not included, since phytoplankton is regarded as the main primary p...

This “Tool kit”, covering practical aspects of beach wrack management, provides guidance for local and regional decisions makers. It serves as both a reference as well as a decision aid to help practitioners convert current beach wrack management schemes into more sustainable solutions.

Beach wrack collected from managed beaches in the Baltic Sea Region could be used as a valuable resource in the blue bioeconomy. Seven CONTRA case studies have highlighted viable uses for beach wrack and the effect of beach wrack removal on the local environment. This brief recommends policy which: supports beach wrack, that is collected from mana...

The shallow coastal water zone of the tide-less southern Baltic Sea is dominated by exposed sandy sediments which are typically inhabited by microphytobenthic communities, but their primary production is poorly studied, and hence four stations between 3.0 and 6.2 m depth were investigated. Sediment cores were carefully taken to keep the natural lay...

The paper distinguishes beach wrack, the marine generated organic part of beach cast, as a separate management object and discusses research questions related to its management and economically viable use. Based on experiences from the Baltic Sea and existing practices from countries with different management systems clear distinction between the m...

The beaches of the coastal communities in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania are the most important attraction for tourists, the most popular inner-German tourist destination. So far, there is no coordinated recycling and disposal concept for beach wrack that covers all municipalities, but rather, similar to beach cleaning, there is a multitude of indiv...

Several floristic studies on macroalgae of Svalbard have been published, but as access to the archipelago is difficult, these studies are scattered and often only cover single sites and habitats. Kongsfjorden, Isfjorden and Hornsund are the three most comprehensively investigated areas, and most of the species information comes from these three fjo...

Organisms in shallow waters at high latitudes are under pressure due to climate change. These areas are typically inhabited by microphytobenthos (MPB) communities, composed mainly of diatoms. Only sparse information is available on the ecophysiology and acclimation processes within MPBs from Arctic regions. The physico-chemical environment and the...

Sediments play an important role in organic matter mineralisation and nutrient recycling, especially in shallow marine systems. Marine ecosystem models, however, often only include a coarse representation of processes beneath the sea floor. While these parameterisations may give a reasonable description of the present ecosystem state, they lack pre...

During several cruises in the southern Baltic Sea conducted in different seasons from 2014 to 2016, sediment cores were collected for the investigation of pore-water biogeochemistry and associated nutrient fluxes across the sediment-water interface. Six stations were positioned along a salinity gradient (ranging from 22 to 8) and covered various se...

Coastal marine sediments are a hotspot of organic matter degradation. Mineralization products of early diagenetic processes accumulate in the pore waters of the sediment, are subject of biological uptake and secondary biogeochemical processes and are released back into the water column via advective and diffusive fluxes across the sediment-water in...

Seven representative sites in the shallow coastal area of the southern Baltic Sea, ranging from permeable sands to fi ne grained muds, were investigated on a seasonal basis for their key mineralization processes as well as their solid phase and pore water composition. The sands showed about one order of magnitude lower organic carbon contents compa...

Three benthic diatom taxa Navicula perminuta, Melosira moniliformis and Nanofrustulum shiloi were isolated from sublittoral sandy sediments from the brackish southern Baltic Sea and established as unialgal cultures. Growth rates were determined under controlled conditions at different incubation temperatures (7–27°C), irradiances (10–600 µmol photo...

Three benthic diatom taxa Navicula perminuta, Melosira moniliformis and Nanofrustulum shiloi were isolated from sublittoral sandy sediments from the brackish southern Baltic Sea and established as unialgal cultures. Growth rates were determined under controlled conditions at different incubation temperatures (7-27 degrees C), irradiances (10-600 lm...

Arctic microphytobenthic in situ net community production (NCP) was measured via the oxygen exchange rate in benthic chambers equipped with optical sensor spots at 3 representative sandy sites in Kongsfjorden (Svalbard, 79° N, 12° E) at 3 to 11 m water depth during June 2008. No significant differences were detected between stations and depths in e...

The benthos of shallow water coastal zones in the Arctic region consists of a consortium of eukaryotic and prokaryotic microorganisms of high biodiversity. The dominant organisms are benthic diatoms, which form an assemblage referred to as microphytobenthos. This phototrophic community is generally known from temperate marine regions as being highl...

In contrast to numerous studies on the biomass of marine microphytobenthos from temperate coastal ecosystems, little is known from polar regions. Therefore, microphytobenthos biomass was measured at several coastal sites in Arctic Kongsfjorden (Spitsbergen) during the polar summer (June-August 2006). On sandy sediments, chla varied between 8 and 20...

Arctic coasts exhibit an enormous area of shallow water regions, which are dominated by unicellular benthic diatoms. These microalgae form a community known as microphytobenthos. Microphytobenthic biofilms cover extensive sediment areas and are responsible for high rates of primary production. They stabilize sediment surfaces against erodibility un...

During summer 2007, Arctic microphytobenthic potential primary production was measured at several stations around the coastline of Kongsfjorden (Svalbard, Norway) at ≤5m water depth and at two stations at five different water depths (5, 10, 15, 20, 30m). Oxygen planar optode sensor spots were used ex situ to determine oxygen exchange in the overlyi...

The Baltic Sea covers an area of 377,000 km² and is the world’s largest brackish-water ecosystem. In geological terms, the Baltic Sea is quite young and its development began with the thawing of the Weichselian ice sheet after the last glaciation 15,000 years BP (before present). Because the connection to the North Sea was mostly temporary, the sal...

The current database on benthic microalgal production in Arctic waters comprises 10 peer-reviewed and three unpublished studies. Here, we compile and discuss these datasets, along with the applied measurement approaches used. The latter is essential for robust com-parative analysis and to clarify the often very confusing terminology in the existing...

Net primary production and respiration were estimated in a hypersaline cyanobacterial mat colonizing a gypsum crust in the Eilat salterns, Israel. Two different approaches were used: in situ microprofiling with Clark-type O(2) sensors and application of optode sensor spots in incubation chambers. The net O(2) release rates of the mat phototrophs wa...

In contrast to numerous studies on the biomass of marine microphytobenthos from temperate coastal ecosystems, little is known from polar regions. Therefore, microphytobenthos biomass was measured at several coastal sites in Arctic Kongsfjorden (Spitsbergen) during the polar summer (June-August 2006). On sandy sediments, chla varied between 8 and 20...

The seasonal succession of brackish microphytobenthos (consisting of diatoms and cyanobacteria) was studied at a wind flat at the southern Baltic Sea coast. Wind flats are coastal zones with a high degree of exposition becoming flooded irregularly as a function of sea levels, prevailing wind direction and speed. These extreme environmental conditio...