Surveillance of benthic macrofauna in connection with construction of the fixed link over resund. This project, funded by the resund Consortium 1995 to present, provides a basis for the authorities in Denmark and Sweden to assess if compliance is present or not with respect to environmental criteria set up for effects of the bridge construction works. A.B. Josefson is task manager for the benthic fauna project. Being a part of an interdisciplinary project the data collected can, in addition to the main purpose, be used to forward our understanding of how stratified estuarine ecosystems function in terms of energy flow between pelagic and benthic compartments. Empirical modelling of eutrophication effects in coastal areas.
Eutrophication is still one of the major environmental problems in coastal areas of Europe.
Despite extensive monitoring over last decades we are still in the beginning of identifying quantitative relationships between eutrophying substances like N and P nutrients and the biological compartments of the ecosystems. In this project we take advantage of the extensive and long-term data on nutrient loads and macrobenthic fauna collected by regional and national authorities in Skandinavian coastal waters to model relationships between nutrient inputs and benthic consumers in estuaries. Estuaries are modelled as mixed chemostats and the aim is to arrive at tool that can predict effects of changed nutrient input on nutrient retention in benthic faunal biomass in estuaries.