Wellbeing from the Baltic Sea – applications combining natural science and economics
Baltic Apps Wellbeing from the
The project studies the supply and demand of marine ecosystem services across the entire Baltic Sea region in a spatially and temporally detailed manner. It develops a harmonized and holistic modelling framework for evaluating the long-term consequences of climate change, socio-economic trends, and management on the provision of the marine ecosystem services and their impact on the wellbeing of the citizens of the Baltic Sea countries. In the project we link biogeochemical and food web models describing future scenarios of water quality and marine flora and fauna, their accompanying intermediate and final ecosystem services, and survey data on the societal value of cultural ecosystem services. Such an interdisciplinary framework, integrating natural science with socio-economics, is used for analyzing strategies to safeguard the long-term supply of high quality ecosystem services to support lifestyles and well-being dependent on sea. In addition, we develop a mobile application to provide spatially and temporally explicit data on the consumption patterns of marine ecosystem services, and to share mapping of the hot spot areas directly and immediately with the public. Hence, the project utilizes state-of-the-art methods of collecting spatial data to fill in knowledge gaps related to ecosystem services particularly important for wellbeing and lifestyles.
