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The global coastal ocean has a significant role in the sequestration of carbon by hosting biological productivity (prominently in upwelling areas) and storing organic carbon runoff from land in sediments, and yields 90% of global fisheries. While the physical boundary conditions of shelf seas are adjusting to global warming, human society continues to exploit their natural resources without sufficient understanding and prognostic capabilities to foresee how exactly the interplay of changing physical drivers and continued exploitation will affect essential ecosystem goods and services.

GENUS aims to clarify relationships between climate change, biogeochemical cycles, and ecosystem structure in a large marine ecosystem, the upwelling system of the northern Benguela / Namibian Coast. The coastal upwelling system has high seasonal and interannual variability in atmospheric forcing, in properties of water masses on the shelf offshore Namibia, and in oxygen supply and demand on the shelf. In consequence, concentrations and ratios of nutrients in upwelling water and their CO2-content have steep gradients in space and time. In the past, significant and economically severe changes in ecosystem structure have occurred which are in part attributed to changes in physical forcing, translated to the ecosystem by oxygen dynamics.

To the GENUS website…

To the GENUS-podcasts