The assessment of corresponding shifts in marine ecosystem functioning and services could be improved by the analysis of quality controlled compiled data within a georeferenced Data and Information System (DIS) revealing relationships between environmental drivers and ecological processes and their variability in time and space. In CoastCarb WP1 we want to implement and utilize and further develop a highly integrated multi-parameter marine-ecological DIS that serves two purposes, to expand our scientific understanding of the system and its (climate driven) development and to provide advice to stakeholders (sustainable management).

The DIS is intended to allow for (a) providing ecological baseline data to assess ecosystem changes, (b) analyzing coupling mechanisms between environmental drivers and ecosystem functions/services on a variety of spatial scales, (c) developing scenarios of ecosystem change in response to external forcing, and (d) creating online stakeholder-oriented visualization and analysis tools. This joint system will lead to a novel and fundamentally improved understanding and an unprecedented level of communication of climate change impacts on polar marine biota, as well as substantially strengthen the partners' visibility and standing in the polar science community.

Kerstin Jerosch is a scientist at Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI, department Functional Ecology), who looks back at 17 years of national and international activity in the field of the GIS, geostatistics, multivariate ecological modelling. She works on strategic efforts to develop and apply suitable tools for analysis and modelling of marine ecosystems with emphasis on the Antarctic seafloor environment and biota. She is a scientist with proven qualifications in the field of spatio-temporal mapping of marine environment and biota using multivariate approaches and has expertise in GIS-based data management and visualization, conception of data models and optimized sampling strategies, data processing and validation up to data publication.

Andrea Piñones is an assistant professor at University Austral of Chile and associate research at the IDEAL and COPAS Sur Austral Centers. She is conducting research in Patagonia and the Southern Ocean, interested in understanding, describing and modeling physical and biological interactions in high latitude marine ecosystems. She is been studying the role of ocean dynamics in the transport, pathways and connectivity of marine organisms at different spatial and temporal scales, using numerical modeling as a tool. Her research interests also focus in individual base models and their coupling with ocean circulation models. She has experienced working with large data bases and the analysis of climate and regional ocean models.