PERSUADE

Coastal areas are increasingly affected by a mixture of global and local pressures. At the global scale, global change, including the combination of both warming and acidification is a well-known phenomenon. In addition to the pressures acting at the global scale, local pressures are often induced by a localized human activity. In coastal areas around Europe, there is an increasing trend towards the installation of offshore wind farms (OWFs) to meet the requirements for renewable energy. The installation of OWFs results in drastic change in the marine environment, through the introduction of large surfaces of hard substrate in an otherwise sandy environment. It is to be expected that the resulting effects on the coastal ecosystem will be an integrated non-linear response to multiple changes. PERSUADE will investigate the integrated effect of both global and local pressures on the resilience of the coastal ecosystem and the production of greenhouse gasses through a combination of ecosystem-wide and model-species experiments, modern genomic tools and ecosystem modeling to investigate the response of the coastal ecosystem to the anticipated multiple pressures.