Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

In the context of global climate change, imminent need for energy security and environmental conservation, renewable energy is now considered an important element of a sustainable energy supply. The UK and Scottish Governments have set ambitious targets for power generation from renewable sources: 50% of electricity is to be generated from renewable sources in Scotland, and 15% of the UK's total energy consumption is to be from renewable sources by 2020. The UK has one of the richest wave & tidal energy resources in the world and is at the forefront of researching, developing & deploying this technology in challenging & energetic ocean environments. The industry's success depends on the natural environment (waves & tides), but often how wave & tidal energy devices interact with the environment is not well understood. Through decades of research UK scientists have gained substantial knowledge about our seas and a wealth of experience & data that could be translated and applied in support of sustainable wave and tidal energy generation. This project will create a common language between the UK research community and companies developing technology to harness ocean energy, and in doing so will support collaboration and information exchange between these groups, and with the UK government and industry regulators, to help maintain the ongoing growth of the industry. While the UK is at the forefront of marine renewable energy development, the production of energy from the ocean is by no means limited to the UK. Indeed projects are being developed on almost every continent around the world which could be accessed by UK companies looking to develop overseas. Likewise, many international companies are interested in developing in the UK. Attracted by the UK's leading position in the field and our wealth of natural resources, some international developers have already secured a place at the wave and tidal energy device testing centres at EMEC on Orkney, and at Wave Hub in Cornwall. Many of the greatest challenges facing such developers, whether in the UK or abroad, is in understanding and managing the interaction of the devices with the environment. During this project the fellow will highlight worldwide hotspots for marine renewable energy development and identifying common environmental challenges around the world. A key objective is to identify, translate and apply world leading UK environmental research to help tackle these common challenges. This Fellowship will signpost international business to applicable UK research and help UK researchers form productive industry collaborations to increase the impact and uptake of their work. The project will highlight relevant research outputs in key challenge areas and summarize these in a series of Bulletins. These Bulletins will be made widely available and targeted to businesses and policy makers in order to increase environmental understanding and therefore reduce risk and costs to businesses associated with tackling environmental challenges. It is anticipated that this approach will encourage financial investment from the industry into the UK, and will give confidence to British companies looking to grow and develop overseas. Academic input into the wave and tidal energy industries can help to reduce the environmental risks associated with many developments in the UK. Subsequently, by reducing the cost of environmental impact assessments and uncertainty around the extreme offshore environments where these projects are situated, confidence in the sustainability of the sector will increase. This will undoubtedly encourage further investment, both from the UK and from abroad, often into the rural or remote coastal locations where the energy resource is greatest. The support and networking provided throughout this project can therefore help to create jobs and spark regeneration in these areas while sustaining an economically strong, world-leading marine renewable energy sector.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

The Blue Bioeconomy defined as ‘the production and conversion of renewable marine biological resources into value added products, such as food, feed, bio-based products and bioenergy’ entails a large set of opportunities for European coastal communities. Innovative business models based on circularity; short-chains, digital solutions and ecosystem contributions offer the chance to stabilize and create new enterprises and jobs also for the lower-educated; while transforming remote, rural areas also into interesting, revitalized, climatefriendly places to live. However, blue bioeconomy actors struggle with challenges related to technology, lack of knowledge & skills or regulatory barriers. BlueBioClusters brings together 13 support organizations from across Europe, all of them highly engaged in their 9 regions in assisting start-ups, companies and policy makers to make best use of innovations. They have joined forces to improve, develop and implement new support tools and methods based on systematic collection, benchmarking and joint knowledge creation on *blue biobased value chains, practice cases and incentives, WP1; *ecosystem service valorization, WP2; *technology needs, identification and transfer of solutions, WP3; *start-ups/SMEs; experts and support mechanisms (coaching; co-creation), WP4; as well as *‘Communities of Practices’ to foster long-term stakeholder cooperation within and across the regions; WP5. While we expect to create long-lasting impact already within the project lifetime itself by engaging with hundreds of actors within our regions to stimulate collaboration and actions for change; activities are designed to be continued post-project being also open for other Blue Regions, clusters and individual companies to join. To that end the inter-active BlueBioCluster portal is not only a repository of the projects’ outputs, but is set up in such way, that it will be continuously updated and maintained by and with its users also post-project

Our knowledge of marine ecosystems is fragmented, and our ability to predict the consequences of various natural and human changes in those ecosystems is limited. To manage the marine environment we need to understand change and consequences of change over large areas and long time periods. In this project we will develop a whole-ecosystem approach to understand changes in marine ecosystems around the UK, and the services they provide. Ecosystem services are the benefits that human society derives from the environment. These include food, recycling of materials and well-being. Coastal and shelf marine ecosystems are biodiverse and complex. They are highly productive, bringing huge benefits to humans. They are also under enormous pressure from human drivers such as fishing and climate change. The role of ecological structure in supporting key ecosystem services is not fully understood. Ecosystem services cannot be measured simply, and they vary in importance and magnitude according to how they are defined and observed. Understanding the ecosystem processes governing the way that services vary naturally, and in response to human pressures, requires a computer-modelling approach. NERC has good models, but these have limited ability to predict change in all but the lowest levels of marine food webs. Several well-respected modelling approaches focusing on food webs and larger organisms such as fish and mammals are commonly used, but gaps in knowledge hamper the inclusion of whole food webs into models that consider environmental and food web changes together. This is due to the way marine food webs have generally been studied in their separate components, at different scales or for specific applications such as biogeochemistry or fisheries. We propose a highly integrated project to make best use of existing data spread among different data holders across the UK and beyond. The integrated data will be used for analyses based on the latest ecological theories to inform and improve a range of models. These models will be used collectively to examine changes in ecosystems and potential future consequences for the services they deliver. The geographical focus of the programme will be the western seas, from the western English Channel, through the Celtic and Irish Seas, to western Scotland, although relevant data from other parts of UK waters will be included where appropriate. The novelty of this project is in using recent technologies to combine existing datasets into an integrated system with new experiments and field work for a genuine whole ecosystem analysis from phytoplankton to fisheries at whole shelf scales. We will include this new knowledge in models to examine how energy and materials move within food webs and how these are influenced by pressures. Model outputs will be translated to the services across the range of scales needed to inform management decisions. The consortium brings together 28 key researchers from 10 UK organisations to integrate existing knowledge, data, models and new information, to allow us to understand how marine ecosystems will change in the future, and how those changes will alter the benefits humans derive from the marine environment. The project is part of a larger programme, and results and outputs will be crucial for supporting development of NERC's biogeochemical models, and application of model development to test the impact and efficiency of potential management interventions. The legacies of this project will include tools and combined datasets that will place the UK far ahead of the rest of the world in terms of our ability to conduct meaningful ecological and food web studies, and a world-leading capability to analyse and model whole ecosystems and understand the consequences of change in terms of ecosystems services.