Study Areas

Study areas for model definition and validation

SESAME's innovation lies in its aim to approach the The Mediterranean and Black Sea as a coupled climatic/ecosystem entity, with links and feedbacks to the world ocean. For data collection purposes, SESAME has planned to conduct specialized studies in specific areas in the Mediterranean and Black Sea selected on the basis of ecosystem and economic criteria related to tourism, fisheries, ecosystem stability and mitigation of climate change. The same areas will be used for model upgrading and validation. These are:

1. The Alboran Sea - Gibraltar Strait (South Western Mediterranean)
2. The Gulf of Lions (North Western Mediterranean)
3. The Sicily Straits
4. The Eastern Levantine Basin
5. The Turkish Straits System and North Aegean Sea
6. The North Western Black Sea
7. The North Eastern Black Sea

The experiments will accumulate scientific knowledge on the selected sub-regional Mediterranean and Black Sea ecosystems for: enabling correct representation of active physical / biogeochemical processes in the sub-basin to basin scale models; defining model features and control variables; and supplying initial / boundary conditions and validating the various models.

Oceanographic Cruises

Ecosystem functions and human uses: Impacts of changes on goods and services

When assessing past and future changes in the ability of marine ecosystems to provide goods and services, considerable attention has to be paid to the study of societal institutions driving environmental change. This translates to the need for an integrated and strategic assessment of the co-evolving systems of marine environment and society, which in turn implies the understanding of ecosystem functions, their criticality in the face of past and future human uses and the societal cost of no action in protecting them. The multidisciplinary approach coupling natural science to socio-economics, bringing together the 'predictive' natural sciences, the semi-quantitative fields of economics and social sciences, will be fully addressed over the wider area of Mediterranean and Black Sea. For this reason, the following five areas (Fig. 3) have been selected for empirical applications:

1. The Alboran Sea (fisheries and carbon sequestration)
2. The Gulf of Lions (tourism and carbon sequestration),
3. The eastern Levantine Basin (biodiversity and carbon sequestration)
4. The north western Black Sea (biodiversity, tourism and carbon sequestration)
5. The north eastern Black Sea (fisheries and carbon sequestration)

Map showing the areas where cases studies will be carried out

Studying these areas will explore the possibility of transferring and/or adapting state-of-the-art analytical and policy tools to investigating the economic welfare implications of alternative development scenarios in the Mediterranean and Black Sea marine ecosystems. A sound methodological approach for integrating scientific modelling and socio-economic analysis will also be developed.