Lifelong impact of Arctic warming on migratory birds The climate is changing most rapidly in the Arctic. How this impacts migratory birds is complex as they spend half their life at southern latitudes. By using revolutionary miniature transmitters, we will track individual birds “from cradle to grave” in order to fully understand this lifelong impact of Arctic warming.

Continental shelf seas represent a small fraction of the ocean’s surface area (<10%), but as they connect the terrestrial realm to the open ocean, they are disproportionally important in global carbon and nutrient cycles. The North Sea is a highly productive shelf sea and a significant net sink of atmospheric carbon dioxide, but the long-term fate of this carbon is largely unknown. Specifically, the extent and variability of carbon and nutrient transport to the Atlantic Ocean versus export to sediments and thus the biogeochemical influence of the North Sea in the wider region are poorly constrained. Here, we aim to determine the past, present and future role of the North Sea within the wider Atlantic Ocean biogeochemical system by constrain ing the exchange of carbon and other essential nutrients between the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean . The main outflow pathway to the Atlantic and main sediment accumulation site is the Norwegian Trench, where intimately coupled sediment-water processes are expected to modulate carbon and nutrient exchange. In the Norwegian Trench, we will quantify the transport and transformation processes that control carbon and nutrient exchange between the land, shelf sea and the open ocean. Combining new, state-of-the-art observations with process studies and reconstructions from sediment archives, we will provide a mechanistic understanding of carbon and nutrient fluxes and the drivers of their variability across timescales from weeks to millennia. Observational results elucidating processes, pathways and fluxes of carbon and nutrients will feed into small-scale, regional and global ocean circulation-biogeochemical models to investigate how environmental and climate change may affect the future cycling of carbon and nutrients within the North Sea and their exchange with the Atlantic. Currently, the North Sea experiences pressures such as overfishing, acidification, eutrophication and deoxygenation. Understanding how these pressures affect carbon and nutrient cycling is crucial to assess the wider implications of environmental change in the coming decades for the North Sea and wider Atlantic Ocean and will also help to determine the changing biogeochemical interactions between other shelf seas and the global ocean.

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Coastal ecosystems shaped by habitat-forming species provide vital ecosystem services but are declining worldwide. Their restoration is failure-prone because ecosystem stability hinges on self-facilitation generated by ‘emergent traits’. Such traits emerge when habitat formers aggregate, causing self-facilitation to only work beyond certain minimum patch size and density thresholds. My recent work demonstrated how biodegradable structures that temporarily mimic emergent traits can overcome such establishment thresholds. These mimics, however, were crude and untailored to the target species and their environment. Here, I will test a new framework that combines methods from ecology, industrial design, and engineering to design tailor-made mimics.

Δ-ENIGMA: The Dutch Delta on the Intensive-Care monitor Deltas and coastal plains are attractive places to live: fertile, flat, open to the sea. These lowlands are, however, also vulnerable to climate-change and sea-level rise. To better predict how deltas develop in the future we need a thorough understanding of how organisms, currents, waves, water&sand discharge shape the delta-landscape. This so-called biogeomorphology lies at the heart of Δ-ENIGMA, which provides infrastructure for intensive observational and experimental research of the Dutch Delta. This will improve our ability to predict future development, and help us live on happily in a changing Delta.