SEA-Quester addresses one of the most pressing questions in climate science: how will ongoing changes in polar and sub-polar oceans alter the ocean’s role in taking up, exporting and sequestering carbon. Polar regions are experiencing rapid environmental changes including warming, retreat of sea ice and glaciers, and changing carbon chemistry and hydrography, which fundamentally reshape both coastal and pelagic ecosystems and the cycling of organic matter. In addition, maritime activities such as fishing and shipping interact with climate change further impacting the biological processes that are the basis of carbon uptake and sequestration. Because polar ecosystems play a disproportionate role in the global carbon cycle, changes here have the potential to affect the global ocean’s capacity to store atmospheric CO2. However, our current understanding of the interaction and feedback between environment, biodiversity and carbon sequestration in polar oceans is weak, which hampers the efforts to predict the future of polar uptake and sequestration of carbon.
SEA-Quester tackles the knowledge gaps in polar carbon through a combination of 1) field work investigating carbon storage and fluxes from coastal ecosystems to open ocean, 2) paleo-oceanographic observations establishing long-term links between environment and carbon burial and 3) trait-based modelling used to quantify the residence time of sequestered carbon globally. The main objectives of SEA-Quester are:
• To document the biodiversity, primary production and function of emerging polar and sub-polar marine ecosystems and to quantify their carbon sequestration – accounting for biomasses, fluxes and residence times of carbon.
• To strengthen the predictive skills of models through trait-based approaches that build on a better understanding of the interactions between functional biodiversity and carbon sequestration, and through assessing the past (paleo-oceanographic) interactions between organisms and their environment.
• To explore the interacting effects of climate change, anthropogenic stressors, carbon sequestration, oxygen demand and nutrient supply.
• To provide a rigorous means of quantifying i) marine carbon sequestration and ii) trade-offs between harvesting marine biomass and its net carbon sequestration that can be used to map, evaluate and compare blue carbon stocks and their potential, and to assess the impacts of conservation vs. other actions.
• To develop observations and monitoring of blue carbon within the framework of Essential Ocean Variables (EOVs).
• To support local, national and EU level policy-makers and management authorities on decisions regarding biodiversity, blue carbon, sequestration and human activities in emerging polar and sub-polar ecosystems as well as to promote ocean literacy with focus on blue carbon.
The results will improve our ability to sustainable manage the polar oceans, accounting for the effects of biomass and biodiversity losses for ocean's ability to sequester carbon and developing better predictions of biologically-mediated carbon uptake, export and sequestration in future.
