S9.2.5 - Ecosystem health in the Baltic Sea

The services fulfilling the EuroDeSS are:

• daily forecasts of ecosystem health, available currently in a limited form through a non-DSS access;
• annual indicator fact sheets derived from operational monitoring and forecast model time series;
• seasonal forecasts of the ecosystem health.

• The services will be based on operational ecosystem model used in Finnish Meteorological Institute, BalEco^TM, which is a coupled physical, chemical and ecological 3-dimensional ocean model. The resolution of the model in horizontal direction is 6 nautical miles, the vertical resolution is concentrated to the euphotic zone and has in total 21 layers.

• Also historical (1979-2006) data from measurements carried out by Finnish Institute of Marine Research will be used to produce maps for comparison purposes.

• Maps describing the current and forecasted state of the ecosystem health in the Baltic sea
• Maps describing the ecosystem health in the Baltic sea in previous decades

To be able to describe the state of the ecosystem health we will use ecological quality ratio (EQR), which will be determined by comparing different indicators to the “reference condition” unique for each Baltic sea basin.

The resulting service will be demonstrated to

• key policymaking bodies in the Baltic Sea (e.g. HELCOM secretariat and HODs)
• regional environmental managers in Southern Finland and Estonia
• representatives of the media around the Baltic.