BSEP116B Biodiversity in the Baltic Sea - Helcom

Baltic esker island, Jurmo, Finland
as projected, so also will the potential abundance
and distribution limits of specific species and communities.
The highly likely acceleration of eutrophication
resulting from higher runoff and changes
in hydrography will also affect biodiversity. This
means, for example, that management measures
to protect Baltic Sea biodiversity also need to be
adjusted and in some cases reinforced. This will
require effective and continuous feedback between
different activities such as monitoring programmes
and management measures and, importantly, the
results of assessments and analyses must be turned
into decisions and implementation.
A good knowledge base to support wellinformed
and cost-efficient management
decisions
The most cost-efficient protection measures can
only be chosen based on good knowledge, including
both environmental and economic considerations.
Only in this way will it be possible to achieve
the necessary balance among the three pillars of
sustainable development: economic, social, and
environmental.
There is a wealth of unrevealed biodiversity of
underwater organisms and small organisms in the
Baltic Sea, as well as of genetic diversity. There is
also a lack of knowledge on the distribution of
many underwater ecological features. Even for
larger organisms including threatened or declining
species, such as the harbour porpoise, the
distribution information is incomplete. It is also
surprising that despite the extensive research on
the Baltic Sea ecosystem, many mechanisms of
human impacts on species or habitats are still not
known or are under heavy debate, such as the
causes of the M74 syndrome of Baltic wild salmon,
potential impacts of the fishing of top predators
on eutrophication through food-web cascades, or
the effects on Baltic biota of the numerous harmful
substances that enter the Baltic Sea.
In order to protect as well as to assess Baltic biodiversity,
it is necessary to increase our knowledge.
In particular, it is important that causal interactions
are better known, i.e., that the driving forces
behind changes in biodiversity are understood and
that human impacts can be distinguished from
natural variations. Currently, cause-effect relationships
have only been established for a limited
number of interactions, such as the effect of some
hazardous substances on selected biota like seals,
the relationship between nutrient concentration
and phytoplankton biomass, and the effect of
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