Assessing the roles of environmental factors in coastal fish production in the northern Baltic Sea: a Bayesian network application.

Environmental conditions play a crucial role in the distribution and abundance of fish species in any area. Much research has been attributed to the requirements and tolerance limits of commercially exploited fish species. It is rare, however, that studies have been able to address the relative importance of potentially restrictive environmental factors; extensive enough to allow for estimation of the effect of several environmental factors through the fishes' life span. The coastline of Finland in the northern Baltic Sea offers a unique natural experimental setting that can be used to assess the relative importance of various environmental factors for the species occupying it. The area includes major variations in several crucial environmental factors: salinity, temperature regime, represented by winter ice duration, coastline characteristics, and eutrophic status. Furthermore, Finland has collected extensive and spatially representative data of water quality and environmental factors, as well as a long and extraordinarily spatially detailed data set of commercial catches of several fish species. In this article, we make an attempt to correlate the environmental data to the commercial catches of fish species, assuming that the commercial catches reflect, to some reasonable degree, the productivity of that species in that area (compared to other areas and combinations of environmental factors, not to other species). We use a Bayesian network approach to examine the sensitivity of the species to the environmental factors.

Zoobenthos as indicators of ecological status in coastal brackish waters: a comparative study from the Baltic Sea.

A new method for classifying soft-bottom zoobenthic assemblages along the Finnish coasts (northern Baltic Sea) is presented and tested against traditional physicochemical monitoring data in the complex Archipelago Sea. Although multivariate methods for assessing the state of the marine environment have become widely used, few numerical indices can operate over a wide salinity range. We compare indices currently in use and propose a new index, BBI (brackish water benthic index), for the low-saline and species-poor Baltic coastal waters. BBI offers a salinity-corrected tool for classification of the soft-bottom zoobenthos under the demands of the European Union Water Framework Directive.

A proposal for a long-term baseline phytobenthos monitoring programme for the Finnish Baltic coastal waters: monitoring submerged rocky shore vegetation.

Several local surveys on the submerged vegetation have been conducted in past decades along the Finnish Baltic coastal areas. Surveys have been carried out by using various methods, which make the temporal comparisons of the results difficult. The need of a joint programme for coastal phytobenthic monitoring is emphasised by the Nordic Council of Ministers and HELCOM. The Finnish coastal phytobenthic monitoring programme complements the Baltic HELCOM monitoring programme (COMBINE). It is primarily designed to reveal the effects of eutrophication. The programme includes general principles for selection of monitoring areas as well as a proposal for monitored habitats, communities and species. The need of evaluated and tested field methods, data collecting, interpretation and data storage are addressed in the Quality Assurance part. The cost-efficiency is secured by integrating the phytobenthos programme with the coastal water monitoring for obtaining the supporting data such like salinity, temperature and nutrients. In the design of the monitoring programme a special interest is paid on areas with high protection values such as Natura 2000 or HELCOM's BSPA (Baltic Sea Protected Areas) or on aspects that would support the implementation of the EU Water Framework Directive.

Novel morphology in Enteromorpha (Ulvophyceae) forming green tides.

"Green tides" are vast accumulations of unattached green macroalgae associated with eutrophicated marine environments. They have major ecological and economic impacts globally, so an understanding of their origin and persistence is required in order to make management decisions. Blooms predominantly consist of two common fouling genera of the Ulvales, Ulva (distromatic sheets) and Enteromorpha (monostromatic tubes). In the Baltic Sea and elsewhere green tides have increased over the last few decades. On the west coast of Finland, summer blooms consist of monostromatic sheets resembling Monostroma (Codiolales). We identified these as Enteromorpha intestinalis by comparative analyses of rDNA internal transcribed spacer 1 (ITS1), 5.8S, and ITS2 sequences, the first time monostromatic sheets have been found in the genus Enteromorpha. Ordinary attached E. intestinalis sporulated freely in culture, but the sheets reproduced only by cell regeneration into typical tubular thalli. The ITS sequences were identical to those of attached E. intestinalis populations in southwestern Finland, but differed by two substitutions from other Baltic sequences. We infer that this bloom originated from local attached populations and now reproduces clonally by fragmentation. This study provides further evidence of radical changes in gross morphology of green algae under eutrophicated conditions and the need for molecular identification.