Work packages

WP1 Transdisciplinary Knowledge collates knowledge from different disciplines together with stakeholder to co-explore existing knowledge regimes, co-develop models to understand system feedback loops, and identify levers for change towards dynamic sustainable management approaches aimed at building resilience of coastal and ocean spaces and people. WP1 will achieve this via stakeholder workshops and an electronic exchange platform that will allow constant exchange between project partners and stakeholder organizations. This will act to define and refine all WP activities over the duration of the project.

WP2 Scenario Planning forms a baseline, providing scenarios of global environmental change and the resulting cumulative impact to natural systems and the human values dependent on biodiversity, extending the work of UCSB on human impacts and the Ocean Health Index. Annual data for 14 stressors from a recent analysis that maps (at high resolution) the pace of change in cumulative human impacts over 11 years (2003-2013) will be analysed. We will extend this work to forecast where and how much future change in cumulative impacts is expected.

WP3 Environmental Responses to Change will focus on changes in biodiversity transcending simplified metrics of temporal richness and turnover trends, using advances in the analysis of compositional change and spatial constraints of temporal trends. This extends classical approaches to include local and regional diversity, as well as the spatial heterogeneity and temporal turnover of species composition (spatial and temporal beta-diversity), using information theory to infer predictability and vulnerability of biodiversity. Multidimensional analyses of existing observational data across all three world regions will be conducted as well as a meta-analysis of existing empirical testing of future environmental conditions. WP3 will benefit from partners in the assessment of multiple biodiversity aspects across species groups, subsystems of coastal areas, and regions.
WP4 Ocean Connections will explore the socio-ecological connectivity for single and multiple NCPs (through frames of predictability, vulnerability, and risk assessment). Via OHI and regional projects, we have access to data on the status of Nature's Contribution to People (both global annual assessments at the country level and in-depth data for many regions around the world). Mirroring biodiversity analysis in WP3, WP4 we will develop metrics to quantify the status and rate of change of single as well as combined NCPs, with the aim to predict vulnerability in the light of rapid environmental change.
WP5 Dynamic Ocean Management addresses Sustainable Development Goal SDG14 by formulating targets for sustainable ecosystem management, which will inform the development of management strategies and tools comprising Recommendations, Options, and Actions. Setting meaningful targets has been shown by work on the Ocean Health Index and MARISCO will profit from the lessons learned. Information for targets will be drawn from WPs1-4.