Marine resources in the Lithuanian coastal zone, including the Curonian lagoon, are strongly affected by the undergoing human activities (oil transportation, port developments, sediment dredging, extraction and disposal, fishery and recreation, etc.). Despite different attempts to evaluate ecosystem changes, application of traditional monitoring techniques frequently lead to low spatio-temporal resolution of observations and weak integration of different environmental parameters during data analysis process. Consequently, human impacts and natural variability can not be clearly distinguished and eficiency of marine resource management often remain low. Therefore the principle objective of this project was to develop and apply modern high quality tools for surveillance and assesment of marine resources in the Lithuanian coastal waters of the Baltic Sea, including the Curonian Lagoon.

This project was finished on May 2011 and short descriptions of the result are placed in this project website according to relevant workpackages.