Gaps in current Baltic Sea environmental monitoring – Science versus management perspectives

Legislations and commitments regulate Baltic Sea status assessments and monitoring. These assessments suffer from monitoring gaps that need prioritization. We used three sources of information; scientific articles, projectreports and a stakeholder survey to identify gaps in relation to requirements set by the HELCOM's Baltic SeaAction Plan, the Marine Strategy Framework Directive and the Water Framework Directive. The most frequentlymentioned gap was that key requirements are not sufficiently monitored in space and time. Biodiversity monitoringwas the category containing most gaps. However, whereas more than half of the gaps in reports related tobiodiversity, scientific articles pointed out many gaps in the monitoring of pollution and water quality. Animportant finding was that the three sources differed notably with respect to which gaps were mentioned mostoften. Thus, conclusions about gap prioritization for management should be drawn after carefully consideringthe different viewpoints of scientists and stakeholders. © 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Funding: This work resulted from the BONUS FUMARI project (Finnish Environment Institute, 2019) which has received funding from BONUS (Art. 185), which is jointly funded by the EU, the Academy of Finland and the Swedish Research Council Formas.