This book presents an interdisciplinary overview over the physical, meteorological,
climatological, chemical, biological and geological characteristics of the Baltic
Sea, based mainly on data of the Leibniz
Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde (IOW) and its precursor
institutions, collected during the past five decades. Several essential topics
outside IOW's observational scope have been added by scientists from other institutions
around the Baltic Sea. |
The Baltic Sea is
perhaps the best investigated sea for more than a century. The Baltic Sea Research
Institute in Warnemünde, with its predecessors, began its monitoring activities
in the 1950s. Regularly, annual assessments of the Baltic Sea state were formulated
on the basis of these and related observational data. The corresponding studies
are written in German and published in reports hardly accessible for the general
public. Only the latest versions are available online, see http://www.io-warnemuende.de/state-of-the-baltic-sea-2007.html.
The
book to be published in 2008 is intended as an extended summary of these reports,
i.e. an interdisciplinary comprehensive description of the development of the
Baltic Sea during the last 50 years, based on long-term observational data. Its
chapters will reflect the most important features from meteorology and climate
over physic and chemistry to plankton and fish, written by well-known experts
of their fields as responsible authors, who are in part already on pension after
decades of research. Although the focus will be on the work and the data of the
Baltic Sea Research Institute, various authors from other institutions and countries
have participated, contributing essential features from outside the institute's
actual scope. Recent changes in ecosystems
are of high socio-economical concern as e.g. underlined by the recent BONUS project,
http://www.bonusportal.org/ . The anthropogenic
impact on the environment of the Baltic Sea has been systematically investigated
by long-term data series for about 50 years. This valuable data basis had not
yet been compiled and evaluated in a comprehensive book up to now. The book concentrates
on long-term changes in the Baltic Sea. It will contribute to the understanding
of long-term water exchange processes, eutrophication, and climatic impacts. The
periodic assessments of the state of the marine environment of the Baltic Sea
ended with the year 1998 (HELCOM 2002) and will be continued earliest in 2010.
They concentrated on eutrophication and contaminants. The forthcoming "Baltex
Assessment of Climate Change for the Baltic Sea Basin" (
http://www.baltex-research.eu/BACC/) will address climatic trends with a focus
on forecast models, mainly as a compilation of literature. The new book on the
"State and Evolution of the Baltic Sea 1952-2005" considers in a comprehensive
way the various aspects of long-term changes which can be relevant for the ecosystem.
It is rigorously based on observations and measurements, which were published
up to now only in part, carried out, guided or assessed by the chapter's authors
working since many years in their particular fields of investigation. A digital supplement is attached to the book in form of a CD data storage medium, containing essential data about the Baltic Sea and its observations, freely accessible and usable for non-commercial purposes. Among those are e.g. reference data (like the bottom topography) and observational data (like the mothly gridded time series of measured temperature, salinity and nutrients since 1900 provided by the BALTIC atlas) from the Baltic Sea. These data sets are intended as a kind of handbook for future observations and as a reference set for numerical models, process studies and state assessments in the coming years of Baltic Sea research. |