Within a new graduate school in marine, climate and environmental issues, 12 doctoral students at several of Stockholm University's departments will be hired. The graduate school is directed towards students who are interested in understanding their own research in a broad and interdisciplinary context. A particular focus is on deepening the understanding and provide new knowledge of the specific conditions and challenges of the Baltic Sea in a changing climate.

The seabed and the bedrock could play an important role for the green transition; for mining of minerals and storing of carbon dioxide. But the environmental consequences of such activities are not fully understood, showed the presentations at the last Baltic Breakfast.

The Baltic Sea Fellows initiative, a network of young Baltic Sea researchers from several disciplines, was launched to strengthen the environmental Baltic Sea research at Stockholm University. The results of this year's awarded research grants from the Swedish Research Council and Formas show that it is going well. The group of researchers has raised over 25 million Swedish crowns this year.

The Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework needs to consider additional groups of chemicals, according to a large international group of researchers. For the UN Biodiversity Conference, COP15, they have developed a perspective article and a policy brief with concrete proposals for better inclusion of hazardous chemicals in the forthcoming targets.

The newly built drifter balances at the end of the four-metre-long boat hook. In a few seconds it will be launched and tested for the first time. At best, it will provide measurement data and can soon be picked up again. At worst, it disappears, forever. It's November when Master students from the course in Physical Oceanography set sail on the research vessel Electra, together with researchers and PhD students from the Department of Meteorology at Stockholm University (MISU). Oceanographer and course leader Inga Koszalka and technician Joachim Dillner at MISU have designed and built drifters that, if they work, will give researchers a better idea of how ocean currents move in the Baltic Sea. That knowledge is needed, among other things, to see how ocean currents affect the oxygen content of the water and to be able to make forecasts for algal blooms during the summer. The drifters are one of several instruments that the Master students will learn to use during the sea excursion. They will also collect data from an instrument on the hull of Electra, called an ADCP (Accoustic Doppler Current Profiler), which measures ocean currents by bouncing sound waves off plankton and other suspended particles in the water.

A progress report for the strategic research area funding to marine research at Stockholm University is now published. The report concludes that the research group Baltic Sea Fellows, which is financed by the strategic funding, has published 200+ publications and managed to double the funding with external grants.

One of our Baltic Sea Fellows, Wei-Li Hong from the Department of Geological Sciences, today got a prestigious award from the Swedish Foundations’ Starting Grant. We are very proud, says Christoph Humborg, scientific leader at the Baltic Sea Centre and coordinator of the Baltic Fellows interdisciplinary network of young Baltic Sea researchers.

The number of great cormorants in Sweden increased greatly during the 1990s and they are now a common species around the Swedish coast and many of the lakes. During the breeding season great cormorants build colonies with a distinctive fishy odor which, along with their voracious appetite for fish, has often made them unpopular. However, great cormorants could give valuable information on environmental contaminants found in aquatic environments according to a new collaborative study from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), the Swedish Museum of Natural History (NRM) and Stockholm University.