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The Inundation Signatures on Rocky Coastlines Global Database for coastal boulder deposits (ISROC-DB)
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Coastal boulder deposits are long-lived signatures of high-energy storm wave and tsunami inundation found on rocky and reefal coastlines worldwide. Although increasing numbers of research reports have been published on coastal boulder deposits, it has been difficult to compare studies from different areas because of a lack of standardised data and of quality-controlled datasets. This paper describes ISROC-DB, a new standardised database compiled from both published and unpublished data. There are two important parts: 1. Uniform standards to enable collation and intercomparison of coastal boulder deposits, with preformatted Excel files to enable convenient data entry; and 2. A freely accessible compiled database of coastal boulder deposit data. Both are published in downloadable permanent archives. Ongoing additions will further increase the database scope.
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RBINS Staff Publications 2025
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Standardising research on marine biological carbon pathways required to estimate sequestration at Polar and sub-Polar latitudes
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Marine biological (‘blue’) carbon pathways are crucial components of the global carbon budget due to the ecosystem services they provide through the fixation of CO2 from the atmosphere. CO2 is removed from biosphere through long-term sequestration into seafloor sediments, removing it from the carbon cycle. Coincident with marine ice loss, little studied negative (mitigating) feedbacks to climate change are emerging in polar waters, which is important to quantify and comprehend. Understanding the mechanisms driving these pathways, that could lead to change, is a massive task and to ensure studies are comparable requires standardisation and prioritisation of future research. The expertise of scientists within the EU grant, Coastal ecosystem carbon balance in times of rapid glacier melt (CoastCarb), identified the 23 most important high latitude pathways through a modified Delphi scoring system. Metrics were selected as priorities for future research and for syntheses across broader geographic regions. The metrics with the highest importance scores also scored as the metrics that could be most readily standardised in the next five years. This review provides a definition and description of how each metric is measured, including its central role to blue carbon pathways. It also provides recommendations for standardisation, emphasising the requirement for modelling studies to scale from geographically limited regions where high-resolution data is available. Where methods cannot be standardised, cross calibration between methods is required to ensure reproducibility. An increasing use of remote sensing and innovative technologies will be necessary to scale measurements across this vast and remote region.
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RBINS Staff Publications 2025
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A description of existing operational ocean forecasting services around the globe
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Predicting the ocean state in support of human activities, environmental monitoring, and policymaking across different regions worldwide is fundamental. To properly address physical, dynamical, ice, and biogeochemical processes, numerical strategies must be employed. The authors provide an outlook on the status of operational ocean forecasting systems in eight key regions including the global ocean: the West Pacific and Marginal Seas of South and East Asia, the Indian Seas, the African Seas, the Mediterranean and Black Sea, the North East Atlantic, South and Central America, North America (including the Canadian coastal region, the United States, and Mexico), and the Arctic. The authors initiate their discussion by addressing the specific regional challenges that must be addressed and proceed to discuss the numerical strategy and the available operational systems, ranging from regional to coastal scales. This compendium serves as a foundational reference for understanding the global offering, demonstrating how the diverse physical environment – ranging from waves to ice – and the biogeochemical features besides ocean dynamics can be systematically addressed through regular, coordinated prediction efforts.
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RBINS Staff Publications 2025
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A description of ocean forecasting applications around the globe
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Operational oceanography can be considered the backbone of the blue economy: it offers solutions that can support multiple UN Sustainable Development Goals by promoting the sustainable use of ocean resources for economic growth, livelihoods and job creation. Given this strategic challenge, the community worldwide has started to develop science-based and user-oriented downstream services and applications that use ocean products as provided by forecasting systems as main input. This paper provides examples of stakeholder support tools offered by such applications and includes sea state awareness, oil spill forecasting, port services, and fishing and aquaculture. Also emphasized is the important role of ocean literacy and citizen science to increase awareness of and education about these critical topics. Snapshots of various applications in key world ocean regions, within the framework of the OceanPrediction Decade Collaborative Centre (DCC), are illustrated, with emphasis given on their level of maturity. Fully operational examples can be used as inspiration for export to other areas.
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RBINS Staff Publications 2025
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Natuurwetenschappen en archeologie: een geslaagd huwelijk!
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RBINS Staff Publications 2025
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Food nutrient availability affects epibiont prevalence and richness in natural Daphnia populations
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RBINS Staff Publications 2020
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A trait-based framework to identify North Sea fauna vulnerable to underwater noise
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In the absence of an internationally coordinated management strategy, continued exploitation of the North Sea is expected to exacerbate underwater radiated noise (URN), heightening risks of adverse impacts on marine life. Identifying indicator species and their habitats is a fundamental step in the EU framework for setting a scientifically grounded underwater noise limit value (UNLV). While past research has primarily emphasized marine mammals, there is an increasing effort to highlight that the impacts of URN extend to fishes and invertebrates. To support indicator species selection in the North Sea for URN risk assessment, a trait-based vulnerability scoring system for marine mammals, fishes and invertebrates was developed. Each scoring system evaluates multiple attributes related to a species' capacity to detect and produce sound, as well as the documented impacts from both impulsive and continuous anthropogenic noise, and highlights species of particular concern and socio-ecological significance. Five potential indicator species were identified from each of the three taxonomic groups (marine mammals, fishes and invertebrates) for URN risk assessment. The proposed vulnerability scoring system serves as an adaptive framework, open to iterative refinement as bioacoustics knowledge advances. Although data gaps persist, the establishment of regional UNLV to safeguard vulnerable species should not be delayed. By linking URN exposure with key habitats of identified indicator species, this approach facilitates an ecosystem-based management of URN in the North Sea and provides a transferable framework for other regions.
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RBINS Staff Publications 2026
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Quality-control tests for OC4, OC5 and NIR-red satellite chlorophyll-a algorithms applied to coastal waters
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Reliable satellite estimates of chlorophyll-a concentration (Chl-a) are needed in coastal waters for applications such as eutrophication monitoring. However, because of the optical complexity of coastal waters, retrieving accurate Chl-a is still challenging. Many algorithms exist and give quite different performance for different optical conditions but there is no clear definition of the limits of applicability of each algorithm and no clear basis for deciding which algorithm to apply to any given image pixel (reflectance spectrum). Poor quality satellite Chl-a data can easily reach end-users. To remedy this and provide a clear decision on when a specific Chl-a algorithm can be used, we propose simple quality control tests, based on MERIS water leaving reflectance (ρw) bands, to determine on a pixel-by-pixel basis if any of three popular and complementary algorithms can be used. The algorithms being tested are: 1. the OC4 blue-green band ratio algorithm which was designed for open ocean waters; 2. the OC5 algorithm which is based on look-up tables and corrects OC4 overestimation in moderately turbid waters and 3. a near infrared-red (NIR-red) band ratio algorithm designed for eutrophic waters. Using a dataset of 348 in situ Chl-a / MERIS matchups, the conditions for reliable performance of each of the selected algorithms are determined. The approach proposed here looks for the best compromise between the minimization of the relative difference between In situ measurements and satellite estimations and the number of pixels processed. Conditions for a reliable application of OC4 and OC5 depend on ρw412/ρw443 and ρw560, used as proxies of coloured dissolved organic matter and suspended particulate matter (SPM), as compared to ρw560/ρw490, used as a proxy for Chl-a. Conditions for reliable application of the NIR-red band ratio algorithm depend on Chl-a and SPM. These conditions are translated into pixel-based quality control (QC) tests with appropriately chosen thresholds. Results show that by removing data which do not pass QC, the performance of the three selected algorithms is significantly improved. After combining these algorithms, 70\% of the dataset could be processed with a median absolute percent difference of 30.5\%. The QC tests and algorithm merging methodology were then tested on four MERIS images of European waters. The OC5 algorithm was found to be suitable for most pixels, except in very turbid and eutrophic waters along the coasts where the NIR-red band ratio algorithm helps to fill the gap. Finally, a test was performed on an OLCI-S3A image. Although some validations of water reflectance are still needed for the OLCI sensors, results show similar behavior to the MERIS applications which suggests that when applied to OLCI data the present methodology will help to accurately estimate Chl-a in coastal waters for the next decade.
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RBINS Staff Publications 2022
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Monitoring of high biomass Phaeocystis globosa blooms in the Southern North Sea by in situ and future spaceborne hyperspectral radiometry
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Phaeocystis globosa (P. globosa hereafter) is a phytoplankton species which commonly blooms at high biomass in April–May in the Southern North Sea and forms undesirable foam which accumulates on the beaches. Monitoring of this species is required by EU directives. Measurement of phytoplankton species composition has historically been made by pigment or microscopic analysis of water samples, which is spatially sparse and temporally infrequent e.g. weekly/monthly. In-water instruments such as flow cytometers can provide very high frequency data but at high acquisition and maintenance cost. Automated in situ above water radiometry has the potential to provide very high frequency data at single locations but requires very careful design of processing algorithms in turbid waters with high non-algal absorption. Spaceborne radiometry could provide both very good spatial coverage and moderate/high frequency of data, e.g. daily/weekly, but accurate determination of phytoplankton species composition is considerably more difficult in turbid waters than in open ocean waters. Prior studies based on a limited number of shipborne reflectance measurements suggested feasibility of P. globosa detection in turbid waters from hyperspectral radiometry. The availability of a new autonomous above water hyperspectral radiometer system has enabled further refinement and intensive testing of these techniques. From a time-series of 4356 water reflectance spectra measured near Ostend harbour in Belgian coastal waters from 2020/04/01 to 2020/08/18, two existing algorithms for P. globosa detection were successfully applied. Results show a high biomass P. globosa bloom occurring in late-April/early-May as found every year in water sample analyses for Belgian coastal waters. The high temporal resolution of the radiometric data allows to capture the evolution of the bloom at time scales sufficiently short (hourly and daily) compared to growth/decay and tidal processes. The challenges of extending the methods to future spaceborne instruments are also tested by simulating the impact of errors in sensor inter-band calibration, atmospheric correction and radiometric noise. Results show that because of their spectral coherence, atmospheric correction errors impact only slightly P. globosa detection whereas inaccuracy in inter-band calibration and radiometric noise are much more problematic as they affect each spectral band independently. Because radiometric noise should be reduced in the new generation of hyperspectral sensors and can always be reduced by spatial binning, the inter-band relative calibration uncertainty appears to be the main challenge for spaceborne mission design. Indeed, it was demonstrated that inter-band calibration error should be 0.25\% and ideally 0.1\% at top of the atmosphere highlighting the need for particular attention to inter-band calibration in sensor design and post processing treatments including vicarious calibration.
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RBINS Staff Publications 2022
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The HYPERMAQ dataset: bio-optical properties of moderately to extremely turbid waters
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Because of the large diversity of case 2 waters ranging from extremely absorbing to extremely scattering waters and the complexity of light transfer due to external terrestrial inputs, retrieving main biogeochemical parameters such as chlorophyll-a or suspended particulate matter concentration in these waters is still challenging. By providing optical and biogeochemical parameters for 180 sampling stations with turbidity and chlorophyll-a concentration ranging from 1 to 700 FNU and from 0.9 to 180 mg m−3 respectively, the HYPERMAQ dataset will contribute to a better description of marine optics in optically complex water bodies and can help the scientific community to develop algorithms. The HYPERMAQ dataset provides biogeochemical parameters (i.e. turbidity, pigment and chlorophyll-a concentration, suspended particulate matter), apparent optical properties (i.e. water reflectance from above water measurements) and inherent optical properties (i.e. absorption and attenuation coefficients) from six different study areas. These study areas include large estuaries (i.e. the Rio de la Plata in Argentina, the Yangtze estuary in China, and the Gironde estuary in France), inland (i.e. the Spuikom in Belgium and Chascomùs lake in Argentina), and coastal waters (Belgium). The dataset is available from Lavigne et al. (2022) at https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.944313.
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RBINS Staff Publications 2022
