Launch of the Sargassum 2 Joint call 2021: Understanding and predicting Sargassum Blooms
Before 2010, the brown algae Sargassum only bloomed in the tropical North Atlantic, while they have recently been observed off the Brazilian coast, down to the Mexican coast and throughout the whole Caribbean Sea. Sargassum is also blooming on the African coastline from Sierra Leone to Ghana, thereby creating the so-called ‘Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt’. The economic impact of this stranding costs millions of euros, especially for the tourism sector. Furthermore, the associated emissions of hydrogen sulphide and ammonia have a significant effect on the health of coastal residents, and the marine ecological impacts have not yet been assessed.
In this context, it is imperative to increase our knowledge of hydrodynamic conditions to develop a reliable understanding of the causes of occurrence and their inter-annual variability in order to better predict the years of high Sargassum bank flotsam conditions.
The second Sargassum joint call for proposals thus covers 3 themes:
- Construction of a common data set to feed the different hydrodynamic models;
- Biological models of Sargassum;
- Development of integrative models coupling hydrodynamics and biology of Sargassum to explain the variability of Sargassum events.
It comes after a first call for "Research, Development and Innovation on Sargassum", launched within the framework of the National Plan for the Prevention and Control of Sargassum, which allowed funding of 12 research projects in order to improve knowledge and propose solutions adapted to the local context.
This joint call is open until 30 January 2022, 2pm (CET). It will support collaborative research projects involving partners from at least two different countries participating to the call.
