Conferences

Fig. 1, Participants of the “1st Marginal Seas Expert Meeting”, Guangzhou, China,
Nov 28, 2019

Research Initiative “Eurasian Marginal Seas-Past and Future” 
Expert Meeting

亚欧边缘海：过去与未来(EMS)科学计划倡议专家会

28th November, 2019
Sanyu Hotel, Guangzhou

Participants(主要参会人员):

China

CGS:

Chief Geoscientist : Guangsheng Yan 
Office officer: Li Wang
Fundamental Construction Division: Jianqiao Wang
International S&T Cooperation Division: Hao He
Institute of Geology, CAGS-CGS: Tao Wang, Wei Li
R&D Center, CGS: Zhengji Gao, Minghua Zhang, Jingji Miao
CUG-Beijing/IUGS: Qiuming Cheng

Germany

HZG: Wenyan Zhang
IOW: Joanna Waniek

Italy

ISMAR-NRC: Federica Foglini

Malaysia

JGM: Abdullah Sulaiman, Amin Noorasid Abdul Jalil

Poland

USZ: Jan Harff, Andrzej Osadczuk, Joanna Dudzinska-Nowak, Jakub Miluch
PGI-NRI: Michał Tomczak, Szymon Uscinowicz, Drzewicz Przemysław

Russia

VSEGEI: Daria Ryabchuk, Vladimir Zhamoida

Spain

UoG-CSIC: Francisco Jose Lobo Sanchez

USA

UM: Kevin McCartney

China

CUG-Wuhan: Xinong Xie, Tao Jiang
GDCC: Bing Wang
IO-CAS: Delei Li
SCSIO: Di Zhou, Tianran Chen
SYTU: Junjie Deng, Guanhua Li
XMU: Stephan Steinke
GMGS: 

Shengxiong Yang, Gaowen He
Lushan Wu, Zhen Xia, Jinpeng Zhang
Xiaoxiao, Yuke Liu, Pingyuan Li

Conference Summary

Due to the complexity of natural marine environments, modeling has to be considered a multidisciplinary task with regard to the overlapping themes of the geosphere, bio(eco)sphere, anthroposphere and climate. Teams operating in this field should be embedded into an interdisciplinary worldwide network of natural, environmental and social scientists (including historians and socio-economists), civil engineers and IT specialists. As the first step of a marginal seas research team, the network for scientific discussion and exchange of concepts and methods should be made available by using existing network structures to be adjusted to new specific tasks.

Considering the complexity of marginal seas’ systems, it is impossible to apply a single model to realistically simulate the diversity of natural environments. This diversity has to be analyzed first in order to determine entities representing types of geologic, hydrographic, dynamic and climatic conditions, requiring individual model approaches. Key areas should be selected serving as natural laboratories for types of marginal seas so that research results can finally be generalized and extrapolated. The selection (respective development) of the appropriate numerical models and their parametrization are supported by analyses of data sources. Therefore, the status of available data plays an important role when selecting key areas. An inventory of data bases (data mining) and rules of standardization and harmonization of research data should be the first steps in regional research.

From the perspective of sequence stratigraphy, the Last Glacial Cycle (~130 kyr) represents an appropriate geological time frame to be reconstructed. Data for model validation are available on different time scales from short term (monitoring data) to long term (represented by proxy-data). For future scenarios, climate model data are available on the centennial time scale. Regarding the spatial scale, main limitations are the too coarse resolution of climate models to reflect regional to local effects of marginal seas. Methods of downscaling have to be considered.

Fig. 2, Conference Presidency of the 3rd Marginal Seas Expert Meeting,
           Guangzhou, China, Dec 14, 2021

Conference Summary:
The scientific lectures and discussions encourage the organizers to continue the tradition of scientific conferences on marginal sea issues. In this way, the relatively new and modern field of marginal sea research can be further developed in a targeted manner.

The initiation of new joint international research projects is emphatically supported.

For advanced future research projects the following challenges have to be considered (listed by conference sessions):

1. Marginal sea research in general (Session 1):
   
   Challenges:

• • Anthropogenic impact on Marginal seas’ environments (“Urban Seas” concept)
  • interaction between geo-, ecosystem, climate and socioeconomic systems in polar and subpolar marginal seas.

2. Coastal morphodynamics (Session 2):
   
     Challenges:

• • Coastal protection versus climate change,
  • Disequilibirum in coastal morphology driven by human activities and climate change.

3. Ecosystem dynamics (Session 3):

         Challenges:

• • Harmful algal blooms – impacting coastal densely populated areas,
  • Assessment of anthropogenic impact on shallow water areas.

4. Methological approach and Geodata management (Session 4):

         Challenges:

• • Spatial data integration and harmonization (Data FAIRness),
  • New technology for seafloor and habitat mapping, remote sensing challenges for environmental application and sea level change detection.

Conference Summary:
Participants from Australia, Denmark, Estonia, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Latvia, Pakistan, Peru, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, USA and Vietnam, presented and discussed 44 conference lectures grouped in 4 Topical Sessions: Session 1 “Climate change and river mouth systems”, Session 2  “Human activities and environmental impacts from the past to the future”, Session 3 “Proxy-records and modern observations” and Session  4 “Advanced data management and modeling”, each of them started with a key note lecture at the beginning and finalized with a special open discussion (Technical program attached). Summarizing the results it can be stated that river mouths systems form the gateways from the continents to the oceans, serving as key areas worldwide for the historical and prehistoric phases of societal evolution. Over the long period of human settlement history an overlapping of natural drivers and anthropogenic effects influence the evolution of the environment. The present time can be described as a transition from human use to human dominance of river mouth systems. Studying the interrelation between natural and anthropogenic drivers is needed for a deeper understanding of the river mouth systems’ development in order to elaborate strategies for a sustainable development of the environment increasingly endangered by climate change and human activities. The concept of “Urban Seas” provides a valuable core to serve as basic concept for the sustainable development of river mouth systems. However, this concept has to be generalized by the extension from “real-time” of the whole time-scale of the development a river mouth system from the pristine “background” environment to the current of industrialization. That means, the time span has to include the Holocene and the Anthropocene in order to detect the onset of human drivers of the system. For the historical reconstruction of paleo-environment a close co-operation between natural scientists, historians and archaeologists is needed for an interdisciplinary interpretation of proxy-data. A synthesis of proxy-data, historical monitoring and real-time data and a generalized data acquisition concept are needed to compare river mouth systems of different climatic zones and geological setting as a base for the elaboration of generalized models to describe specific river mouth systems. When collecting relevant data, socio-cultural, economic and ecological considerations regarding natural changes in the environment and their perception of indigenous people as valuable sources of information must be taken into account.

Conference Report

by

Jan Harff, Joanna Dudzińska-Nowak, Wenyan Zhang (conveners)

This report refers to the Topical Session S#18 “Marginal Seas Dynamics and Modeling” embedded into the 22nd Annual Conference of the International Association for Mathematical Geosciences (IAMG), Trondheim, Norway, Aug 6 -12, 2023. This session was co-organized by the DDE Marginal Seas Task Group established within the frame of the Deep-time Digital Earth (DDE) Big Science Program of the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) initiated at the IAMG2019 conference, State College, USA, Aug 10-16, 2019. The general target of this meeting was to discuss the opportunities of application of advanced data science such as monitoring concepts, big data analyses, numerical modelling, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) for sustainable development of the coastal and marine realm of marginal seas. The meeting served at the same time as “6th International Marginal Seas Expert Meeting” of the DDE Task Group to pave the road for continuation of the successful work. 

The conveners are particularly grateful to the IAMG Council for supporting the participation of students and Early Stage Researchers by providing grants covering the registration fees for them. Conference program and abstracts of presentations are available online https://www.iamgconferences.org/iamg2023/.

Advanced morphogenetic models of the coastal realm were presented by Wenyan Zhang and Arlinghaus that have been used in particular for the 1st R&D Project of the DDE Marginal Seas Task Group. In their presentation, the authors pointed out the complex character of the processes in which biotic and abiotic drivers of the transport processes are balanced. Harff et al. introduced the methodological concept expressed by a conceptual equation to study marginal seas exemplified by results from the Beibu Gulf, South China Sea, that the team of authors did jointly study during the last decade.

Monitoring, reconstruction and future projection of coastline scenarios formed the main sub-topic of the session because coastal flooding and erosion are threatening most the human communities living along the sea coasts. Jankowski and Dudzińska-Nowak discussed a concept for long-term monitoring at the southern Baltic Sea coast in a cause-effect study. Presented decadal coastline variability and correlation coastal accretion and erosion with the frequency of water level extremes and storm surges as driving forces clearly explain why, due to the complexity of the processes, data set acquisition must take into account geological/tectonic parameters as well as sedimentological, geomorphological and climatic/meteorological/oceanographic factors. The spatial-temporal structure of the accretion- erosion pattern reflecting the variability of the processes was considered in the research results presented by Dudzińska-Nowak in her poster presentation. The results clearly show that determination of size, dynamics, and regularity of the coastline changes are needed for a comprehensive understanding of processes acting on different temporal and spatial scales. Corresponding numerical models for coastal morphological studies reduce the uncertainty of future projections. 

A particular challenge of today is the identification of the essential (invariant) information in a giant abundance of globally avialable measured data. Today, AI and ML provide innovative methods for filtering out the essential information components. Arlinghaus et al. reported about promising classification methods and fuzzy logic concepts for the identification of trends in coastal development for the North and Baltic Sea as Luo used comparable methods for South China Sea coast of the Chinese Guangdong Province for the risk assessment of coastal disasters in the frame of Integrated Coastal Zone Management.

Increasingly for the morphogenetic and environmental reconstruction of coastal seas methodological hybrid concepts have been developed integrating the reconstruction of the paleogeographic / paleoceanographic by backstripping the sedimentary record including the interpretation of sedimentary proxy data and by numerical forward modeling. Jinpeng Zhang described the evolution of the Cenozoic shelf sediments of the South China Seas as the result of interfering sea-level change, river discharge and monsoon dynamics controlled by global climate cycles. Also Wang is principally following this concept focusing the time scale to the Holocene and the spatial scale to the Mekong delta. However, the latter author is completing the interpretation of sedimentary proxy-data by the application of sediment transport forward models explaining the spatial distribution of sediments in the delta by the dynamics of the depositional environment. 

Modeling the development in high latitudes processes of glacio-isostatic adjustment (GIA) of the Earth’s crust to the loading and unloading of inland ice due to climatic cyclicality has to be considered. Frydel presented a model describing phenomenologically the effect of interacting eustatic sea-level change, GIA and meteorological /oceanographical drivers to the change of coastal morphology and applications to the southern Baltic Sea coast. Miluch et al. applied the conceptual equation introduced by Harff et al. in their presentation to the description of the paleo-geographic Holocene evolution of the Baltic Basin. With their study, the authors succeeded for the first time ever in convincingly presenting the history of the Baltic Sea basin, which is complicated by the interrelationship between the North Atlantic and the partially isolated freshwater basin. 

The concept of marginal sea research specifically aims to develop a methodology to support the sustainable development of marine areas. Therefore, the investigation of the superimposition of natural and anthropogenic influencing factors on marine development plays an outstanding role. Yu et al. intend to use a data-driven model to train and verify the evolution of the Pearl River Estuary (PRE) filling over the past century, and to predict future changes based on different scenarios of interrelation between natural and anthropogenic drivers. This data-driven model compared with the existing process-based morphodynamic model and monitoring data help to quantify and understand the relative effects of different human activities and natural sediment depositional processes on estuarine evolution. Laizhou Bay (LB) in the South Bohai Sea, China, served for Mu et al. as key area to study the impacts of natural factors and human activities on coastal evolution. Methodological comparable to the PRE study the authors used a neural network classifier applied to satellite imagery data to extract shoreline position in this region. They compared these positions with historical nautical charts and obtained a 130-year dataset on sandy shorelines. To analyze the shoreline evolution under the different anthropogenic scenarios, a shoreline model was applied using corresponding sediment input and structure parameters, as well as the wind and wave data setup. 

Yang Zhang et al. presented in their poster the application of singularity theory of fractal density to predict the ocean heat flow on the global scale. Latest heat flow, geological and geophysical data suggest power-law models for the description of heat flow trends. The results for different types of continental margins can provide valuable base data for the classification of marginal seas. 

In summary, we conclude that the complexity of the processes to be examined requires innovative solutions and interdisciplinary approaches to describe the natural diversity of the processes. In order to use global model data for regional applications in marginal seas, downscaling plays a prominent role in marginal sea research. In marginal seas, data are spatially very unevenly distributed. In areas with high data density, AI and ML can lead to the identification of invariant information parts that describe regularities in a redundant data environment. Since morphodynamic processes, such as erosion events, do not behave linearly to the intensity of the driving parameters, special statistics of the extremes, in particular of meteorological and oceanographic processes, are required. Different degrees of quantification for the input parameters of decision models (such as Bayes classifiers) are to be permitted for risk assessment in the sustainable management of the marine realm. A prerequisite for successful, sustainable management is the formation of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research teams.

Co-leader of the DDE Marginal Seas Task Group, Prof. Joanna Dudzinska-Nowak (Poland, 2nd from right) discussing her poster at the IAMG2023 with Dr. Aisha Alqahtani (Saudi Arabia, 2nd from left), Dr. Peter Arlinghaus (Germany, 1st left) and Jerzy Frydel (Poland, 1st right)

Conference Summary
The conference was directed to four main targets: Extension of the international Marginal Seas Research Network, further development of fundamental and applied fields in marginal sea research, scientific support of the current and future DDE Marginal Seas research projects, definition of the grand challenges of marginal seas research as basis for the preparation of future research projects.
The conference was structured into four topical sessions: River impacted continental shelves - sediments and environment, coastal processes, ecosystem dynamics and methodological approaches and Geodata management, including Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.

The scientific part of the conference was introduced by 3 plenary keynote lectures. During the topical sessions, 4 keynotes lectures and 41 regular lectures were delivered, and 11 poster lectures were presented. 

Extended discussions summarized the results of each topical session and a final discussion session was held to conclude the general outcomes of the conference. which was attended by more than 100 participants from 11 countries.

The scientific lectures and discussions encourage the organizers to continue the tradition of scientific conferences on marginal sea issues. In this way, the relatively new and modern field of marginal sea research can be further developed in a targeted manner. 

The initiation of new joint international research projects is emphatically supported. 

For advanced future research projects the following challenges have to be considered: 

1. River impacted continental shelves - sediments and environment (Session 1):

• Temporal evolution of river systems and they impact on the sediments of continental shelves.
• Influence of rapid climate change on landscape.

As an extension of topical session 1, a special discussion was held about a joint R&D Project under the DDE Marginal Seas Task Group umbrella supported by the Guangzhou Marine Geological Survey (GMGS). In 2023 the GMGS did run a drilling campaign on the shelf off the PRE. The sediment core will be made available to an international research team to study the development of the Pearl River Mouth System during the Pleistocene and Holocene. Research program and options are suggested to be discussed at an ad hoc online meeting "Marginal Seas and River-Shelf Interface (RiSI)" on Dec. 8, 2023 hosted by the GMGS.

2. Coastal processes (Session 2):

• To define the linking of geological and geomorphological settings and driving forces and the response in coastal zone morphodynamic.
• To develop methods of different data source integration for reliable analysis.
• To increase the accuracy numerical modeling by integration with measured data

3. Ecosystem dynamics (Session 3):

• Biodiversity of diatom and their biogeography, huge species and genera numbers and potential news taxa finding
• Diatom fossil application in coastal and sea area for record on paleo-meteorology, paleo-climate events, paleo-bloom in higher and low latitude zone. 
• Assessment of human being forcing and natural impact on the nearshore and shelf area.

4. Methological approach and Geodata management (Session 4):

• All the presentation provided an idea about the need of modelling natural phenomena. To this aim FAIR data management is the key and the way forward to effectively being able to provide reliable models. 
• While a large amount of publications present the current status of AI methodologies used by the marine science community, many other AI topics are not yet in use in the marine domain and need to be considered to advance the current observing systems and data analysis procedures.
• Given the multidisciplinary of the presentations future steps will be also to integrate different results to give a holistic view of the marginal sea and being able to provide valuable models.

Onsite and online participants of the hybrid mode 7th International Marginal Seas Expert Meeting, Guangzhou, China, Nov 27 – Dec 1, 2023