Facts:
Project period
2013-2017
Project leader
Ing-Marie Gren
Project co-workers
Wondmagegn Tirkaso
Project funder
Swedish Environmental Protection Agency
VALUES (Value of underwater habitats ecosystem services)
Last changed: 09 March 2020
Coastal areas of the world contain some of the highest service values in the world is under severe human pressure. The project VALUES will develop methods for quantifying and valuation marine ecosystem services with a focus on the role a nutrient regulation and provision of fish in the Baltic Sea. Another purpose is to estimate the damage cost of the invasive worm Marenzelleria in the Baltic Sea.
There is a growing consensus that ecosystem services which are not subject to market transactions need to be evaluated in other ways in order to be included in the decision making processes. The interdisciplinary project VALUE addresses this issue by developing methods for quantifying and valuing marine ecosystem services in the Baltic Sea.
The focus is on two types of ecosystem services; nutrient regulation by the sediments and provision of food from fish. With respect to the former, aphotic soft substrate sediments, which cover approximately 90% of the Baltic Sea seafloor, is important for decomposition of organic matter and re-mineralization of nutrients. Marenzelleria, a polychaete genus which was first observed 1985 in the southern Baltic Sea, changes the functioning of these sediments and thereby nutrient regulation mainly through its deep network of burrows. This, in turn, implies that more or less nutrients are available which affects the damages of eutrophication. This project calculates the economic effects of Marenzelleria as the impacts on costs of reaching international agreements on nutrient in the Baltic Sea.
It is well known that fish populations are affected by nutrient enrichments. In this project we calculate the effect of nutrient loads on European perch off the Swedish south east cost. The production function approach is used where nutrient enrichment is regarded as a (negative) input for provision of perch.