We are delighted to announce that Germany has joined the JPI Oceans Joint Action on Science for Good Environmental Status (S4GES). The Joint Action operates as a Knowledge Hub with elements of infrastructure sharing. It strives to contribute to the attainment of marine Good Environmental Status (GES), an obligation that the Marine Strategy Framework Directive gave EU countries. Germany's participation in the Knowledge Hub will further strengthen the cooperation and integration of European countries to assess and achieve GES. Dr. Silke Laakmann from the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity at the University of Oldenburg (HIFMB) and Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, and Dr. Anneke Heins from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen will represent Germany in the group of experts that is at the heart of the Knowledge Hub.
Germany is joining the Joint Action as a promising new GES assessment approach developed in 2022 for the first seagoing campaign in the North Sea needs to be further developed and tested in other sea basins and oceanographic settings. The approach follows the idea of integrating an oceanographic system's physical, chemical and biological characteristics to analyse the integrity of the trophic web. To improve efficiency over current approaches, S4GES builds on the increasing availability and affordability of technologies such as satellite observations for real-time selection of sampling sites and environmental DNA analysis for ecosystem data.