As platforms for dialogue, art-science collaborations hold the potential to cross disciplinary boundaries to better understand and engage the public in addressing sustainability challenges. Moving beyond documenting outcomes, this study details how researchers and composers combined science communication and artistic expression to co-produce performances as part of the Baltic Sea Festival Science Lab. Drawing on insights from...

Marine ecosystems are increasingly reshaped by climate change and human activities, resulting in novelty in species assemblages that have shifted beyond historical baselines. One unresolved question is how novelty influences resilience. Here, we examine how novelty arises in ecosystems when they transition through phases and affects resilience using the adaptive cycle framework. We use results from an ecosystem model of the Fi...

The ecological role, bloom extent and long-term dynamics of jellyfishes are mostly overlooked due to sampling limitations, leading to the lack of continuous long-term datasets. A rise in frequency and magnitude of jellyfish invasion around the world is shedding new light on these organisms. In this study, we estimate the current and future distribution of the introduced jellyfish Blackfordia virginica in the Baltic Sea. We det...

Environmental changes reshape biological communities, inducing cascading effects throughout the food webs. These changes pressure species either to adapt or to track favorable habitats. Estuaries represent an interesting case study to investigate such responses as species will rapidly reach physical boundaries if they cannot adapt fast enough and need to track suitable conditions. One such estuary is the Baltic Sea, characteri...

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...

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...

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 identifi...

Future climate biogeochemical projections indicate large changes in the ocean with environmental conditions not experienced at present referred to as novel, or may even disappear. These climate-induced changes will most likely affect species distribution via changes in growth, behavior, evolution, dispersal, and species interactions. However, the future risk of novel and disappearing environmental conditions in the ocean is po...

Global environmental changes have accelerated at an unprecedented rate in recent decades due to human activities. As a consequence, the incidence of novel abiotic conditions and biotic communities, which have been continuously emerging in the Earth system, has rapidly risen. Despite growing attention to the incidence and challenges posed by novelty in terrestrial ecosystems, novelty has not yet been quantified in marine ecosys...

Benthic–pelagic coupling is manifested as the exchange of energy, mass, or nutrients between benthic and pelagic habitats. It plays a prominent role in aquatic ecosystems, and it is crucial to functions from nutrient cycling to energy transfer in food webs. Coastal and estuarine ecosystem structure and function are strongly affected by anthropogenic pressures; however, there are large gaps in our understanding of the responses...

Changes in climate, in combination with intensive exploitation of marine resources, have caused large‐scale reorganizations in many of the world's marine ecosystems during the past decades. The B altic S ea in N orthern E urope is one of the systems most affected. In addition to being exposed to persistent eutrophication, intensive fishing, and one of the world's fastest rates of warming in the last two decades of the 20th cen...

The degree to which marine ecosystems may support the pelagic or benthic food chain has been shown to vary across natural and anthropogenic gradients for e.g., in temperature and nutrient availability. Moreover, such external forcing may not only affect the flux of organic matter but could trigger large and abrupt changes, i.e., trophic cascades and ecological regime shifts, which once having occurred may prove potentially irr...

We tested the hypothesis that CO 2 supersaturation along the aquatic conduit over Sweden can be explained by processes other than aquatic respiration. A first generalized‐additive model (GAM) analysis evaluating the relationships between single water chemistry variables and p CO 2 in lakes and streams revealed that water chemistry variables typical for groundwater input, e.g., dissolved silicate (DSi) and Mg 2+ had explanatory...