Szczecin Marginal Seas Webinars | December 2023
We warmly invite you to join a second presentation of the Szczecin Marginal Seas Webinars within the winter semester of the academic year 2023/2024, dedicated to our colleague and friend Prof. Dr. Andrzej Witkowski who passed away on September 17, 2023."
The second Webinar to be held on December 14, 2023, 2:00 pm (CET).
Please, join our meeting for the lecture presented by:
Dr. Peter Arlinghaus
Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon, Institute of Coastal Systems - Analysis and Modeling, Geesthacht, Germany
Artificial Intelligence in marginal sea research - chances and challenges
Abstract:
Artificial intelligence is an interdisciplinary tool that has reached and advanced all scientific and non-scientific fields such as economy, medicine or geosciences. Pioneering work was achieved in this field in the 1950s, however with the wide availability of computational resources, both in hard- and software, it has received strong recognition in the past ten years and has grown immensely in popularity. High-performance computing is now affordable for anyone and open-source machine learning frameworks like scikit-learn, PyTorch or TensorFlow enable accessibility for a large community. Thus, artificial intelligence was adopted in all fields of geo- and earth sciences such as remote sensing, weather forecasting, marine ecology, hydrodynamics, seismology, geochemistry or hydro-geophysics to name a few. In this presentation we will give a brief overview of the history and current state of artificial intelligence and machine learning. State of the art studies illustrating the capabilities of AI in geosciences will be presented from data driven to physics informed AI-models.
More specifically the application of AI in Marginal Sea Research will be introduced. Marginal Seas are lying at the transition zone between land and ocean and are thus subject to extensive human activities and stressor (pollution, land reclamation, tourism, shipping, fisheries, offshore wind farms) and multiple natural drivers (tides, waves, storm surges, sea level change) which are impacting the marine environment and ecosystem. All these drivers impact the development of the coastline which is globally inhabited by more than 600 million people. Since the evolution of coastline is highly dynamic it is important to identify and understand the processes guiding the change in order to develop sustainable management solutions to preserve and protect the coast.
One approach to do so is the use of remote sensing data. In this context an ongoing study will be presented which aims to classify and identify the coastline in the North and Baltic Sea, based on multispectral satellite images from the past 40 years (Sentinel-2, Landsat-5) employing machine learning methods. Automatic coastline classification based on machine learning is proven to be robust for sandy beaches on regional and global scales. However, sandy beaches only make around one third of the world’s ice-free shoreline. The rest consists of mudflats, cliffs, different types of vegetation and human constructions. Classification of these features is challenging. In order to improve the classification of other landforms a deep learning approach is utilized. The main challenge is to create an encompassing dataset, covering a large variety of different coastline types. Three methods are developed in order to reduce the effort of image labeling, namely 1. an active learning framework which allows high performance with strongly reduced amount of training data, 2. a sophisticated selection method to pick a valuable initial dataset for the active learning and 3. an unsupervised labeling method to accelerate the labeling process itself. Fundamental machine learning concepts like data normalization, clustering, dimensionality reduction and data fitting will be explained.
The seminar will be held in an online form on the MS Teams platform.
The meeting room will be open from 1:30 pm (CET), but the seminar will begin at 2:00 pm (CET).
Microsoft Teams meeting
Join on your computer, mobile app or room device
Click here to join the meeting
Meeting ID: 335 517 750 784
Passcode: MTEaKc
News from SCOR
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2024 SCOR Visiting Scholar
Submit an application to serve as a 2024 SCOR Visiting Scholar!
The SCOR Visiting Scholar program enlists the services of ocean scientists, from both developed countries and developing countries, to teach short courses and to provide more extended on-site education and mentorship at developing country institutions.
This program is open to any scientists who have time available to spend teaching and mentoring in a developing country for ideally two weeks or more. The scholarships are not intended to conduct joint research, although collaborative research may develop as an outcome of a visit.
Applications will be reviewed by the SCOR Capacity Development Committee based on the following criteria:
- Quality and relevance of the proposal focusing on knowledge exchange and mentoring in ocean sciences.
- A detailed working plan for the visit which should be co-developed with the host institution.
- Experience of the candidate and fit with the program (language skills, teaching/mentoring experience, subject areas requested by the institution).
- Needs of the host institution and an estimate of how many students and/or early-career scientists will benefit from the training.
- Plans by the host institution to build upon the training/mentoring received.
More information about the call and the application form can be found here.
Deadline for applications: 29 December 2023
Conference "Marine Geology: Marginal Seas - Past and Future"
The International Conference "Marine Geology: Marginal Seas - Past and Future", November 27 - December 1, 2023, will be hosted by the Guangzhou Marine Geological Survey, China Geological Survey, China, co-organized among others by the University of Szczecin, Section of Marine Geology and Polish Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research, Polish Academy of Sciences.
The conference is free of charge and held in hybrid form, in-person and online remote scientific presentations are welcome.
The four thematic sessions are announced:
(1) River impacted continental shelves - sediments and environment,
(2) Coastal processes,
(3) Ecosystem dynamics and
(4) Methodological approaches and Geodata management, including Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.
On behalf of the conveners of the session (2) Coastal processes, Tarmo Soomere (Estonian Academy of Sciences; Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia), Xinong Xie (China University of Geosciences in Wuhan, China), Abdullah Sulaiman (Institute of Geology Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia), I would like to invite you to join our session.
Coasts around the world are constantly changing as a result of land-sea-atmosphere interaction. The consequence of the ongoing climate change is the observed intensification of extreme phenomena such as storm surges, floods, tsunamis, and heavy rainfalls. This superimposed by eustatic sea level rise, changes in the wind and wave direction, and a general deficiency of sediments in the coastal zone result in increased coastal erosion and pose a real threat to the safety of the coast in terms of the natural environment and the existing infrastructure crucial for coastal municipalities and society. To mitigate current coastal hazards and prevent future impacts, it is essential to have a comprehensive understanding of the physical, geological, biological, and chemical processes that control the source-to-sink transport of sediments on the Earth's surface, including their anthropogenically driven modifications. The aim of this session is to bring together interdisciplinary, international expertise to provide an overview of the current research status of coastal morphodynamics research and future perspectives. We welcome submissions that are of an analytical or laboratory nature, in the field or involve numerical modeling on a local, regional, or global scale, from single events to the scale of decades and millennia.
The deadline to submit abstracts for contributions is shifted to November 10.
Please, be warmly invited to attend the conference either onsite or online actively and forward the Announcement to your students, research teams, and scientific networks.
Szczecin Marginal Seas Webinars | October 2023
We warmly invite you to join a new series of the Szczecin Marginal Seas Webinars within the winter semester of the academic year 2023/2024. Please, find the program for this semester attached.
We dedicate this program to our late colleague and friend, Prof. Dr. Andrzej Witkowski, co-convener of the Szczecin Marginal Seas Webinars, who passed away on September 17, 2023.
Our first Webinar this semester will be held on October 26, 2023, 2:00 pm (CET).
Please, join our meeting for the lecture presented by:
Dr. Tim Jennerjahn
Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT), Bremen, Germany
A vicious cycle: how coastal development impairs biodiversity, Blue Carbon storage and other ecosystem services - and what can be done
Tim C. Jennerjahn1,2, Shiquan Chen3, Xiaoping Diao4, Lucia Herbeck1, Esther Thomsen1,5, Daoru Wang3, Jialin Zhang1, Hongwei Zhao4,6
1 Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research, Bremen, Germany
2 Faculty of Geoscience, University of Bremen, Germany
3 Hainan Academy of Ocean and Fisheries Science, Haikou, China
4 State Key Laboratory of Marine Resource Utilization of South China Sea, Hainan University, Haikou, China
5 Project Seagrass, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
6 College of Ecology and Environment, Hainan University, Haikou, China
Abstract:
The tropical island of Hainan is the largest special economic zone of China and its coasts were once lined with mangrove forests, seagrass meadows and coral reefs. The beauty of these coastal ecosystems founds their economic potential for tourism, which is a major and growing sector. However, activities in other major economic sectors, i.e. agriculture, aquaculture and urbanization/industrialization, affect and impair the integrity of the coastal ecosystems and hence their economic potential and related livelihoods of the population.
This vicious cycle started in the 1960s when mangroves were massively deforested and converted into aquaculture ponds on Hainan. Brackish water aquaculture, with intensive use of artificial fertilizers and feed was and is a major pillar of Hainan's economy. Untreated wastewater including large amounts of anthropogenic nitrogen is either released into semi-enclosed coastal bays or directly into coastal back-reef areas where it leads to eutrophication. We traced the pathway of anthropogenic nitrogen from aquaculture ponds into coastal waters and sediments as well as into the food web over four trophic levels. Seagrasses are strongly impaired, abundance and diversity are declining, in some places they disappeared totally. Coral reefs are similarly affected by eutrophication, organic pollutants, overfishing and other threats. The connectivity of coastal ecosystems is disrupted and ecosystem service supply is diminished.
Long-term research in the inter- and transdisciplinary collaborative Sino-German projects LANCET, ECOLOC and TICAS enabled us to delineate causes and consequences of coastal development for ecosystem functioning, services and connectivity in Hainan's coastal zone. We established a science – society interface and developed and implemented measures towards a more sustainable use of the coastal zone together with stakeholders from policy and civil society. Measures included awareness raising among all stakeholders through education events in schools, public talks, stakeholder workshops, radio interviews, art exhibitions and 'citizen science'. Recommendations for decision-makers were published in a Policy Brief and training courses were conducted for aquaculture farmers. Finally, seagrass conservation and restoration projects led by transdisciplinary teams are in operation. Hainan stands as an example for problems related to coastal development observed around the globe, but also shows a way forward towards sustainability.
The seminar will be held in an online mode on the MS Teams platform.
The meeting room will be open from 1:30 pm (CET), but the seminar will begin at 2:00 pm (CET).
Microsoft Teams meeting
Join on your computer, mobile app, or room device
Click here to join the meeting