About this Research Topic

Background

The coastal ocean is essential for many creatures. Due to climate change and human activities, the coastal ocean is experiencing environmental issues such as eutrophication, deoxygenation, and acidification, which are potential threats to human and marine animals. Thus the process, effect, and mechanism need to be explored for preventing and dealing with these issues. However, because the coastal ocean is highly dynamic in time and space, traditional discrete sampling approaches are not robust enough to map the temporal and spatial variations of the crucial parameters of nature, and cannot explore the effect and mechanism of the rising environmental issues. Therefore, high-resolution observation and data in time and space are urgently needed, e.g. underway instruments, moorings, gliders, AUV, profilers, remote sensing, and so on. In such cases, long-term and extensive data are invaluable resources to follow the process and mechanism of environmental concern at present.

Coastal ocean such as estuaries, bays, gulfs and lagoons, are very dynamic on hour-to-hour or day-to-day scales due to tide, topography and weather. While ship-based discrete sampling may span weeks or months, thus can not distinguish short-term variation of the environment, as well as their process, effect and mechanism of eutrophication, deoxygenation and acidification. Thanks to those high resolution sensors and analytic measurements, processes, effects and mechanisms can be studied in a labor-saving and comprehensive way. For example, remote sensing can cover an extensive area in a short time, and gliders and AUV could give high spatial resolution data of transects. Unmanned profilers will give high-resolution results of profiles in time and space. Underway instruments could map environmental variation in surface water continuously using a shorter time interval; all these methods will help us to improve our knowledge of the effect and mechanism of coastal eutrophication, deoxygenation, and acidification, and will be beneficial to the development of marine chemistry.

Coastal eutrophication, deoxygenation and acidification are closely related. Revealing the effects and mechanisms of these issues heavily rely on high resolution observation methods such as remote sensing, moorings, glider, AUV, profilers, underway investigation, and so on.

• Processes and potential threats of eutrophication, deoxygenation and acidification to coastal environment and lives.
• Controlling mechanism of eutrophication, deoxygenation and ocean acidification.
• Coupling and decoupling processes or mechanisms of the coastal eutrophication, deoxygenation and ocean acidification.
• Anthropogenic contribution and climate change on the development of coastal eutrophication, deoxygenation and acidification.

Keywords: high resolution observation, coastal eutrophication, deoxygenation, acidification

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