Publications

Jon Norberg, Thorsten Blenckner, Sarah E. Cornell, Owen L. Petchey, Helmut Hillebrand, Jessica Gurevitch. 2022. Failures to disagree are essential for environmental science to effectively influence policy development. Ecology Letters. https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.13984

While environmental science, and ecology in particular, is working to provide better understanding to base sustainable decisions on, the way scientific understanding is developed can at times be detrimental to this cause. Locked-in debates are often unnecessarily polarised and can compromise any common goals of the opposing camps. The present paper is inspired by a resolved debate from an unrelated field of psychology where No...

Sampsa Koponen, Sakari Väkevä, Ari-Pekka Jokinen, Elina Virtanen, Markku Viitasalo. 2022. Blue Carbon Habitats – a comprehensive mapping of Nordic salt marshes for estimating Blue Carbon storage potential. Nordic Council of Ministers. https://doi.org/10.6027/temanord2022-506

Uusitaloa, L., Blenckner, T., Puntila-Dodda, R., Skyttäa, A. et al. 2022. Integrating diverse model results into decision support for good environmental status and blue growth, Science of The Total Environment, Volume 806, Part 2. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.150450.

Sustainable environmental management needs to consider multiple ecological and societal objectives simultaneously while accounting for the many uncertainties arising from natural variability, insufficient knowledge about the system's behaviour leading to diverging model projections, and changing ecosystem. In this paper we demonstrate how a Bayesian network- based decision support model can be used to summarize a large body o...

Kininmonth, S.; Blenckner, T.; Niiranen, S.; Watson, J.; Orio, A.; Casini, M.; Neuenfeldt, S.; Bartolino, V.; Hansson, M. 2022. Is Diversity the Missing Link in Coastal Fisheries Management? Diversity, 14, 90. https://doi.org/10.3390/d14020090

Fisheries management has historically focused on the population elasticity of target fish based primarily on demographic modeling, with the key assumptions of stability in environmental conditions and static trophic relationships. The predictive capacity of this fisheries framework is poor, especially in closed systems where the benthic diversity and boundary effects are important and the stock levels are low. Here, we presen...

Uusitalo, L., Blenckner, T., Puntila-Dodd, R., Skyttä, A., Jernberg, S., Voss, R., Müller-Karulis, B., Tomczak, M.T., Möllmann, C. & Peltonen, H. 2021. Integrating diverse model results into decision support for good environmental status and blue growth. Science of The Total Environment doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.150450

Sustainable environmental management needs to consider multiple ecological and societal objectives simultaneously while accounting for the many uncertainties arising from natural variability, insufficient knowledge about the system's behaviour leading to diverging model projections, and changing ecosystem. In this paper we demonstrate how a Bayesian network- based decision support model can be used to summarize a large body of...

Belgrano, A., Novaglio, C., Svedang, H., Villasante, S., Melian, C.J., Blenckner, T., Bergstrom, U., Bryhn, A., Bergstrom, L., Bartolino, V., Skold, M., Tomczak, M., Wikstrom, S.A., Hansen, A.S., Linke, S., Emmerson, R., Morf, A. & Tonnesson, K. 2021. Mapping and Evaluating Marine Protected Areas and Ecosystem Services: A Transdisciplinary Delphi Forecasting Process Framework. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 9, 652492.

Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are an important tool for management and conservation and play an increasingly recognised role in societal and human well-being. However, the assessment of MPAs often lacks a simultaneous consideration of ecological and socio-economic outcomes, and this can lead to misconceptions on the effectiveness of MPAs. In this perspective, we present a transdisciplinary approach based on the Delphi method f...

Ammar, Y., Voss, R., Niiranen, S. & Blenckner, T. 2021. Quantifying socio-economic novelty in fisheries social-ecological systems. Fish and Fisheries doi.org/10.1111/faf.12626

Socio-economic development has shaped fisheries social-ecological systems (SES) worldwide across different scales. No work has yet undertaken how this development led to novel, not experienced before, systems structure in marine SES. Here, we quantify socio-economic novelty as the degree of dissimilarity relative to a specific spatiotemporal baseline in the Baltic Sea fisheries SES between 1975 and 2015. We used catch by "gear...

Tomczak, M.T., Müller‐Karulis, B., Blenckner, T., Ehrnsten, E., Eero, M., Gustafsson, B., Norkko, A., Otto, S.A., Timmermann, K. & Humborg, C. 2021. Reference state, structure, regime shifts, and regulatory drivers in a coastal sea over the last century: The Central Baltic Sea case. Limnology and Oceanography doi.org/10.1002/lno.11975

The occurrence of regime shifts in marine ecosystems has important implications for environmental legislation that requires setting reference levels and targets of quantitative restoration outcomes. The Baltic Sea ecosystem has undergone large changes in the 20 th century related to anthropogenic pressures and climate variability, which have caused ecosystem reorganization. Here, we compiled historical information and ident...

Cosens, B., Ruhl, J., Soininen, N., Gunderson, L., Belinskij, A., Blenckner, T., Camacho, A., Chaffin, B., Craig, R., Doremus, H., Glicksman, R., Heiskanen, A., Larson, R., Similä, J.. 2021. Governing complexity: Integrating science, governance, and law to manage accelerating change in the globalized commons. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2102798118

The speed and uncertainty of environmental change in the Anthropocene challenge the capacity of coevolving social–ecological–technological systems (SETs) to adapt or transform to these changes. Formal government and legal structures further constrain the adaptive capacity of our SETs. However, new, self-organized forms of adaptive governance are emerging at multiple scales in natural resource-based SETs. Adaptive governance in...

Belgrano, A., Novaglio, C., Svedäng, H., Villasante, S., Melián, C., Blenckner, T., Bergström, U., Bryhn, A., Bergström, L., Bartolino, V., Sköld, M., Tomczak, M., Wikström, S., Hansen, A., Linke, S., Emmerson, R., Morf, A., Tönnesson, K.. 2021. Mapping and Evaluating Marine Protected Areas and Ecosystem Services: A Transdisciplinary Delphi Forecasting Process Framework. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2021.652492

Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are an important tool for management and conservation and play an increasingly recognised role in societal and human well-being. However, the assessment of MPAs often lacks a simultaneous consideration of ecological and socio-economic outcomes, and this can lead to misconceptions on the effectiveness of MPAs. In this perspective, we present a transdisciplinary approach based on the Delphi method f...