Forage fish are small, low-trophic-level species that support aquatic food webs and provide livelihoods, protein and income in communities around the world. In the Tonlé Sap basin, fishers catch them for immediate consumption and for processing into fermented paste, dried products and other foods. Interviewees described eating small fish in soups, stir-fries and pancakes, and making fish paste, or prahok, an important condiment in Khmer cuisine. Dried or fermented fish remains particularly valuable in rural households where electricity and refrigeration are limited. These products also carry cultural significance, although city consumers tend to buy them mainly for special occasions rather than as everyday food. For rural households, dried fish products can provide protein when fresh fish or meat is unaffordable.

The field study took place over two weeks in October 2025 in several Tonlé Sap villages known for dried-fish practices, with additional interviews at landing sites and with small and industrial-scale farmers in the Tonlé Sap area and around Phnom Penh. It drew on prior work conducted from November 2022, including a doctoral study that included 10 months in the region, research on processors in 2023 and 2024, and long-term work on Cambodian fishing villages. Because the 2025 campaign was brief and involved 22 participants, it identified value-chain relationships and lived experiences rather than measuring the total volume of fish diverted to aquaculture. The research covered artisanal fishers, fish processors and farmers involved in different parts of the value chain, but the interviewees were not all members of those three groups. No dataset was generated or analysed for the current study.

Women who process forage fish occupy a central but increasingly vulnerable position in the food chain. In a first step known as “half processing,” workers remove bones, guts and heads, then lightly salt the remaining fish meat for later fermentation into paste. The study reported an average of 12 to 13 kilograms processed by one woman in a half-day. The work usually begins as soon as fish are landed because cold storage is scarce. Processors also need to select suitable fish because some species are preferred for fish paste, including moonlight gourami. The discarded heads, bones and guts are not necessarily waste: they can be sold to fish farmers as feed. This division turns a single catch into competing outcomes, with edible meat supporting a labor-intensive food product and the remainder entering the feed chain. When women no longer process fish, they are largely excluded from the seafood supply chain because preparing food for people is more labor-intensive than supplying fish directly to farms.

Fish paste can command a much higher price than the original catch, but that market value does not necessarily reach the households performing the most demanding work. Small, mixed fish were reportedly sold for 37 to 50 US cents per kilogram. After processing, 50 kilograms of fish could yield 25 kilograms of meat and 25 kilograms of trimmings in the study’s worked example. The meat was sold for 1.25 dollars per kilogram, while trimmings fetched 12 cents. Fish paste made from the meat later sold for 6.25 dollars per kilogram at a town market. The study distinguished the returns received by different actors: middle people who moved fish made a similar amount per kilogram to female casual workers preparing half-processed fish, but transport work was less physically intense, took less time and operated at much greater volume. Casual processors were paid 12 cents per kilogram, whereas the 10-cent figure concerned traders’ margins. Some women were paid in trimmings, which interviewees described as especially poorly paid because processing yields fewer kilograms of trimmings than the weight of the original catch.

Aquaculture began expanding in the study area during roughly the preceding decade, giving some fishing households another source of income. Farmers said fresh forage fish were cheaper than pellets or formulated aquafeed, particularly when they lived close to fishing grounds, and some believed that snakehead fed with fresh fish tasted better and commanded a higher price. Interviews indicated that small farmers could use anywhere from several hundred kilograms to more than 1,000 kilograms of forage fish or trimmings per day, depending on farm size and availability. One farmer estimated needing 500 to 600 kilograms of small fish each day for farmed fish. Farmers also combined fish with rice bran, pellets and homemade ingredients, while some operations farther from the lake used a larger share of aquafeed because transport made fresh forage fish more expensive. Fish farming could provide an additional income stream, but farmers also described risks when they could not feed their fish regularly and when the cost of forage fish rose.

The conversion of wild forage fish into high-value farmed fish can be inefficient. The study cited reports indicating that more than one kilogram of wild fish may be required to produce one kilogram of farmed fish, and estimates above four kilograms for some snakehead operations. The authors calculated that 500 kilograms of forage fish could feed 2,000 people for a day at a quarter kilogram per person, using a reported Cambodian average consumption of 45 kilograms of fish per year. This was explicitly presented as a rough comparison, not a measured nutritional outcome. Cambodia banned snakehead farming from 2004 to 2016 in response to concerns about the volume of forage fish used as feed and lifted the ban after a pellet alternative was developed, yet the researchers did not observe snakehead-specific pellets being sold or used in the farms they visited. They noted that farmers still used fresh fish, trimmings or mixed feeds, and that affordability and taste preferences shaped these choices.

Scarcity added pressure to all three groups. Snakehead farmers interviewed for the study reported paying 15 US cents per kilogram for forage fish in 2015, 50 cents in 2024 and 62 cents in 2025, attributing the increase partly to reduced supply. Fishers also described a structural problem: catching costs more while the market price of forage fish remains low. Processors need cheap, stable inputs because their labor costs are relatively steady and retail prices for fish products do not respond immediately to fluctuations in raw-fish prices. Fishers would benefit from higher prices, whereas small farmers can often buy in bulk and obtain credit, giving them more resilience. The study also cited an analysis of 17 years of catches for 110 species that reported a decline exceeding 85 percent in Tonlé Sap fish populations, alongside hydrological alteration from dams, blocked migration routes, sand mining and other environmental pressures. The authors said the causes of scarcity are complex and that diversion to feed is only one of several contributing pressures.

Cambodian policy pulls in several directions. The country’s 2016–2030 Aquaculture Strategy promotes inland freshwater farming and describes low-value fish as a potentially useful feed resource for higher-value species, while also supporting the development of pellets and aquafeed. Fisheries enforcement has targeted illegal gear and seasonal closures, including a 2025 campaign that confiscated large quantities of nets, traps and electric fishing equipment. At the same time, the government has pursued export markets for fish paste and farmed fish, including a quality-seal scheme for fish paste and expanding catfish production for China. The researchers noted that none of the women they interviewed knew about the fish-paste certification programme. They did not interview government officials, so their interpretation of enforcement intentions remained provisional rather than a direct assessment of policy implementation. These policy directions can support different groups while imposing costs on others, including fishers and processors who depend on access to small fish.

The findings point to distributional justice as a lens for evaluating policies that connect capture fisheries, aquaculture and trade. The central question is not simply whether aquaculture should expand, but who receives the benefits and who bears the costs when forage fish move between food and feed chains. A shift toward feed can provide farmers with inputs, raise demand for catches and create income, yet it may reduce access to inexpensive fish for poorer consumers and diminish demand for the labor of women processors. The evidence does not establish that aquaculture caused the region’s broader fishery decline, and the authors did not quantify how much Tonlé Sap forage fish enters feed markets. Nevertheless, their qualitative study shows how even a nascent aquaculture sector can generate a distributional conflict: some households gain new opportunities, while others lose access to a food source and a traditional source of paid work. The authors argue that policy should examine these trade-offs explicitly, including the effects of certification, gear rules, seasonal closures and aquaculture support on marginalized groups.

Subject of Research: Distributional justice in Cambodia’s freshwater forage fisheries

Article Title: Blue injustice: competing claims for freshwater forage fisheries

Article References: Marschke, M., Cranmer, C., Kadfak, A., Yai, P., & Vandergeest, P. (2026). Blue injustice: competing claims for freshwater forage fisheries. Regional Environmental Change, 26(4), 219. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-026-02706-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10113-026-02706-8

Keywords: Tonlé Sap fisheries, forage fish, freshwater aquaculture, food justice, blue justice, Cambodia, fish processing, food security, livelihoods, small-scale farming, Blue, injustice

Nature-based Solutions, commonly abbreviated NBS, are actions that protect, restore or sustainably manage ecosystems to tackle societal challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss and food insecurity. When applied to marine and coastal environments, they are known as blue NBS. These interventions range from safeguarding existing habitats like mangrove forests and coral reefs to restorative actions such as replanting seagrass meadows and salt marshes, along with sustainable management measures that meet criteria set by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The appeal is enormous: blue NBS can simultaneously store carbon, buffer shorelines against storms, sustain fisheries and support human health and wellbeing. One-third of the world’s population lives within 100 kilometres of the coast, and roughly 40 percent of large cities with more than one million inhabitants sit near the coastal zone, so the stakes for getting these solutions right could hardly be higher.

Despite that potential, blue NBS implementation trails terrestrial and urban applications, in part because practitioners and decision-makers have lacked tailored tools and resources for planning interventions at sea. Marine and coastal areas are notoriously difficult environments for environmental management. They host numerous human activities, diverse stakeholder interests and multiple governance levels, all combined with the high heterogeneity and dynamism of coastal ecosystems. Management interventions can also produce positive, neutral or negative outcomes depending on stakeholder perspectives and local context, which makes meaningful engagement essential rather than optional. The MaCoBioS team argues that overcoming these barriers requires coordinated action uniting researchers, practitioners, policy-makers, industries and local communities, with active knowledge exchange across the science-policy-practitioner interface.

The toolbox itself is accessible at macobios.eu/toolbox and opens with a landing page that explains its aims, introduces key concepts and summarises the context of the project. Six StoryMaps offer information on multiple marine and coastal ecosystems, including mangrove forests, coral reefs, kelp forests, maerl beds, seagrass beds and salt marshes, alongside some of the fieldwork undertaken within the project. An infographic then drives users toward the intended use of each tool through short descriptive questions, so that even newcomers can identify which resource fits their problem. Each tool also has its own subpage with more detailed guidance, and every tool can be applied as a standalone procedure even though the structure leverages the interdependencies and complementary approaches between them.

The first tool addresses a deceptively simple question: what happens to the ecosystem and its services if pressures increase or decrease? Through fuzzy cognitive mapping, the conceptual models help managers visualise the complexity of marine and coastal ecosystems and simulate cascading effects following changes in pressure, therefore revealing the potential effects of intended management measures before they are implemented. This kind of simulation matters because coastal systems respond to the interplay between climate change and human activities in ways that are rarely linear, and managers need to anticipate system changes rather than react to them after damage has occurred.

A second resource, called Coast-Adapt, asks whether a coastal community will be able to adapt to change and how its adaptive capacity can be enhanced. It provides guidance for developing and applying an index-based adaptive capacity assessment in coastal social-ecological systems, supporting future management decisions aimed at reducing social vulnerability. A third tool, MARITIME, tackles the question of where management to reduce local pressures is most needed. MaCoBioS developed a Machine Learning-Cumulative Impact Assessment model that supports the design of blue NBS by modelling the response of marine and coastal ecosystems to cumulative impacts, helping planners understand how the combined weight of climate change and human activities affects ecosystem condition across space.

Two further tools round out the planning sequence. MAS-NBS, short for Multi-tiered Approach to assess Suitability for NBS, provides a framework to identify the most favourable conditions for intervention by combining environmental, social, economic and governance dimensions, so practitioners can pinpoint areas with suitable conditions for implementing blue NBS. PBI-Support, the Potential Blue Interventions Support tool, then offers a clear and structured framework to guide decision-makers and practitioners through the initial stages of planning potential interventions. Beyond the tools, the main page describes the methods MaCoBioS employed to collect biodiversity data that can inform monitoring strategies, presents short policy-relevant thematic briefings with accompanying guidelines on innovating with nature and people, enhancing uptake of blue NBS in European policies, implementing blue NBS to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss while improving human health, and research orientations for the field, and links to a WebGIS interface that delivers ecoregional-level data through an interactive visualisation tool accessible to practitioners, researchers and the public alike.

The toolbox arrives at a moment when international and European policy frameworks are demanding exactly this kind of actionable science. Key initiatives such as the Sustainable Development Goals on climate action and life below water, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the EU Biodiversity Strategy 2030 all emphasise the need to halt biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation by integrating environmental considerations into policy-making to combat climate change. The European Commission and the Council of the European Union have acknowledged that protecting and restoring marine environments, along with conserving natural habitats and species, is a key priority. Yet translating scientific findings into practical real-world applications remains a persistent challenge for conservation science, and more effort is required to ensure that evidence effectively transforms into actions protecting marine and coastal biodiversity.

What distinguishes the MaCoBioS effort is its collaborative genesis. Throughout the project, active communication channels were maintained between toolbox developers and different stakeholders to identify and produce resources that support the earliest stages of blue NBS implementation. The team stresses that effective blue NBS must be grounded in evidence and embedded in social networks, legitimacy and context, which requires research and practice conducted collaboratively with a people-centric approach. Implementation should consider the local social, economic and ecological setting, be built on effective partnerships and strong stakeholder engagement, and establish clear objectives that inform design and enable evaluation. Practitioner knowledge and experience, the researchers note, is essential for advancing blue NBS at international and national levels, but stakeholder engagement is equally crucial because outcomes differ depending on perspectives and context.

The team presents the toolbox as an important initial set of resources rather than a finished product, and ongoing collaboration between researchers, practitioners and policy-makers will be essential to refine and adapt the tools to diverse social-ecological contexts. The creation of adaptive policies for managing dynamic and complex marine and coastal ecosystems requires flexible and innovative tools that address multifaceted issues, uncertainties and a wide range of future conditions. This continuous co-development of knowledge and tools, the researchers argue, will enhance the resilience and sustainability of marine and coastal ecosystems, ultimately benefiting the communities that depend on them. As societies increasingly recognise the vital role of the ocean in mitigating and adapting to climate change while supporting biodiversity, accessible and usable resources like this one could determine whether blue NBS fulfil their promise or remain an aspiration confined to policy documents.

Subject of Research: MaCoBioS Blue NBS Toolbox for marine and coastal Nature-based Solutions

Article Title: Informing implementation of Nature-based Solutions in marine and coastal environments: the MaCoBioS Blue NBS Toolbox

Article References: Casal, G., Fonseca, C., Allegri, E., Bianconi, A., Boyd, E., Cornet, C. C., de Juan, S., Espinoza Córdova, F., Furlan, E., Gil, A., Krause, T., Maréchal, J.-P., McCarthy, T., Özkiper, O., Pérez, G., Pham, H. V., Roberts, C., Simide, R., Simeoni, C., … O'Leary, B. (2025). Informing implementation of Nature-based Solutions in marine and coastal environments: the MaCoBioS Blue NBS Toolbox. One Ecosystem, 10, Article e149010. https://doi.org/10.3897/oneeco.10.e149010

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/oneeco.10.e149010

Keywords: Informing, implementation, Nature-based, Solutions, marine, coastal, environments, MaCoBioS, Blue, Toolbox, scientific research

The blue crab is native to the western Atlantic Ocean and most likely entered the Mediterranean during the 1940s through ballast water discharge from transoceanic shipping. Since then its populations have expanded across a wide range of coastal habitats, with a marked acceleration since approximately 2017. The species is an opportunistic predator with broad trophic flexibility, exploiting fish, invertebrates, polychaetes, macrophytes and especially bivalves, and documented declines in native bivalve stocks have followed its arrival, from oysters in Spain’s Ebro Delta to the aquaculture of the Manila clam in Italy’s Po Delta. Females can produce up to four million eggs per spawning event, and the crab is euryhaline, tolerating wide ranges of salinity and temperature, which allows it to colonize coastal waters, estuaries and lagoons with equal ease.

These traits combine to make early detection both difficult and urgent. Under Regulation (EU) No 1143/2014, early detection means confirming an invasive alien species before it becomes widely established, yet conventional surveys based on trapping and visual census frequently miss low-density invasions. In the Ebro Delta, roughly five years elapsed between the first detection of the blue crab and the onset of exponential population growth. Notably, the species is not currently listed among the invasive alien species of Union concern, and recent analyses suggest its Adriatic expansion is being facilitated by rising sea surface temperatures, adding urgency to calls for harmonized surveillance and coordinated management across Member States.

Environmental DNA metabarcoding offers a molecular alternative. By extracting DNA directly from water or sediment, amplifying universal genetic markers such as COI with degenerate primers, and applying high-throughput sequencing, researchers can identify entire biological communities from a single sample. But the approach has well-known constraints. Incomplete reference databases limit taxonomic resolution in marine and transitional ecosystems, and because universal primers amplify DNA from many taxa simultaneously, DNA from a rare target species competes with DNA from all co-occurring organisms during PCR. Low-abundance species may therefore be underrepresented in sequencing output or excluded during bioinformatic filtering, undermining the very sensitivity needed for early detection of invaders.

Targeted eDNA assays sidestep this competition by using highly specific primers that selectively amplify DNA from a single species. The Salento team began by downloading five COI sequences representative of Mediterranean blue crab populations from NCBI GenBank and establishing the forward primer position with Primer-BLAST. To minimize cross-reactivity, they compiled a list of roughly 1300 aquatic animal species co-occurring with the crab in Mediterranean coastal and transitional ecosystems, retrieving Folmer-region COI sequences for about 600 of them and testing the candidate primer in silico against this panel. The reverse primer was designed manually outside the Folmer region, about 500 base pairs downstream, to yield an amplicon optimal for both Sanger sequencing and next-generation sequencing while ensuring reliable species-level identification.

Only the primer pair predicted to amplify exclusively Callinectes sapidus was retained. The final primers, named CSapFor and CSapRev, were then validated experimentally. Genomic DNA extracted from blue crab muscle tissue produced a single amplicon of the expected 464 base pairs, while DNA from two non-target control species, the brown shrimp Penaeus aztecus and the Mediterranean mussel Mytilus galloprovincialis, generated no visible bands under the tested PCR conditions. Sanger sequencing of the crab amplicon returned a BLAST match exclusively with Callinectes sapidus sequences, with 100% sequence identity, confirming that the amplified fragment corresponds to the intended target region.

The researchers then applied the assay to environmental samples. One-liter surface water samples were collected from the Aquatina di Frigole lagoon in southeastern Italy, the Neretva River Delta in Croatia, the San Benedetto del Tronto coast and Tronto River Delta in central Italy, and the Venice Lagoon, yielding 22 eDNA samples in total. Each replicate was pre-filtered through a 0.5-millimeter mesh to remove particulates and PCR inhibitors, then filtered through 0.45-micrometer cellulose filters from which DNA was extracted. High-throughput sequencing of the COI amplicons on an AVITI platform generated 10,773,406 raw reads, averaging about 500,000 reads per sample. Every operational taxonomic unit assigned at the species level was identified as Callinectes sapidus, and the most abundant OTU was detected across all pilot areas, demonstrating the assay’s ability to identify the species even at low DNA concentrations.

Because similarity-based classification alone cannot assess the evolutionary coherence of identified sequences, the team added independent phylogenetic validation. They built a maximum-likelihood tree from 96 blue crab amplicon sequence variants together with reference COI sequences representing the diversity of the genus Callinectes and a mud crab sequence as an outgroup. The topology resolved two well-supported lineages among the reference taxa, consistent with previously published molecular phylogenies of the genus, and all metabarcoding-derived variants clustered coherently within the Callinectes sapidus lineage, clearly separated from congeneric species. The researchers caution that the more than 2500 variants should not be read as extensive evolutionary diversification; amplicon sequence variants preserve even single-base polymorphisms, so many represent closely related mitochondrial haplotypes differing by only one or a few nucleotides, as reflected in the short branch lengths within the crab clade.

A haplotype network analysis added a phylogeographic dimension. The network resolved a star-like topology anchored by a predominant central hub spanning all Adriatic pilot areas and Mediterranean reference sites, with single-mutation tip haplotypes radiating outward. The dominant Mediterranean hub appears directly connected to reference sequences from Mexico, supporting the hypothesis that the species was introduced from the Gulf of Mexico via ballast water transport, with the broad distribution of the primary haplotype across all Adriatic locations reflecting high gene flow driven by prolonged pelagic larval drift and the strong oceanographic connectivity of the Adriatic Sea. Distinct spatial partitioning emerged, with high haplotype richness in the Neretva River Delta and Aquatina di Frigole Lagoon and a subset of variants apparently localized in the Venice Lagoon, hinting at localized demographic processes and ongoing in situ microdiversification after settlement.

The study represents one of the few experimental demonstrations confirming the feasibility of detecting an invasive species through targeted eDNA analysis, complementing earlier probe-based qPCR methods for the blue crab. Previous analyses of the same Adriatic pilot areas using the widely adopted degenerate primer pair mCOIintF/dgHCO2198 did not consistently detect the species, whereas the species-specific primers succeeded across all sites, underscoring the sensitivity gain that targeted design delivers. Beyond early detection, the approach yields genetic data that can reconstruct invasion dynamics at the molecular level, identifying haplotypes originating in the native range or following introduction into the Mediterranean. As rising temperatures continue to favor the establishment and spread of this invader, the researchers argue that integrating molecular detection methods into invasive species management offers a powerful means to detect and track invaders even in the absence of physical specimens, ultimately informing the targeted control measures needed to protect native Mediterranean coastal ecosystems.

Subject of Research: Development and validation of a targeted environmental DNA assay for early detection of the invasive blue crab Callinectes sapidus in Adriatic coastal-marine ecosystems

Article Title: Targeted eDNA Survey Enables Consistent Detection of the Invasive Blue Crab in Trans‐Border Adriatic Coastal‐Marine Ecosystems

Article References: De Donno, M. D., Zangaro, F., Arnosti, P., Bergamin, S., Boban, J., Bozzetti, M. P., Cazzetta, A., De Pittà, C., Dessanai, D., Drigo, F., Julius, O. T., Ključe, L., Lušić, J., Marcucci, F., Massaro, R., Morelli, V., Moro, I., Nazlić, N., Pellizzato, M., … Pinna, M. (2026). Targeted eDNA Survey Enables Consistent Detection of the Invasive Blue Crab in Trans‐Border Adriatic Coastal‐Marine Ecosystems. Ecology and Evolution, 16(10), Article e74462. https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.74462

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1002/ece3.74462

Keywords: Targeted, eDNA, Survey, Enables, Consistent, Detection, Invasive, Blue, Crab, Trans, Border, Adriatic

The stakes are considerable. The GBMWHA, inscribed by UNESCO in 2000, protects over one million hectares of vegetation celebrated for its Outstanding Universal Values, including ancient Gondwanan plant lineages found nowhere else on Earth. Yet rainforest represents only about one percent of the currently mapped vegetation in the reserve. When vegetation mapping fails to match what grows on the ground, management decisions such as prescribed burning, conservation prioritisation and threat mitigation are built on a distorted picture of where significant biodiversity actually resides. For fire-sensitive rainforest pockets embedded within flammable eucalypt forest, that distortion can be lethal.

The research team set out to validate the regulatory vegetation map units, known as Plant Community Types (PCTs), across the Hawkesbury subsection of the GBMWHA, an area bounded by the Colo, Nepean-Hawkesbury and Grose rivers and the township of Bilpin. The PCT classification is a major numerical undertaking: it was built from more than 90,000 floristic plots spanning 23.5 million hectares of eastern New South Wales, standardised to a modified six-point Braun-Blanquet cover-abundance scale, and embedded within the NSW State Vegetation Type Map (SVTM) that now underpins environmental regulation. Preliminary field survey, however, had hinted at large-scale mapping errors in the region’s remote gullies, where deep sheltered terrain and the moisture-rich Burralow Formation sediments create conditions favourable to rainforest.

To test whether the vegetation in these largely unsurveyed areas could be reliably matched to existing PCTs, the researchers deployed 55 plots across two complementary survey campaigns. Forty-six plots followed the standard NSW government technique for assessing cover and abundance within 20 by 20 metre quadrats, while nine larger circular plots of roughly 700 square metres quantified structural elements such as size class distributions and growth stages, with allometric equations scaling projected foliage area against stem diameter. Sites were stratified along an aridity gradient and split between two topographic positions: ‘Gully’ sites in deep sheltered locations near creeks, and ‘Bench’ sites at more elevated positions at the base of escarpments or on upper slopes. Crucially, the team also recorded bryophytes, the mosses, liverworts and hornworts typically overlooked in vegetation classification, through 15-minute active searches at 26 plots.

The statistical verdict was unambiguous. Using non-metric multidimensional scaling ordinations built on Bray-Curtis dissimilarity, the metric emulating the NSW PCT classification approach, the team found that their field plots occupied vacant ordination space defined by the established PCTs. Permutational multivariate analysis of variance (PERMANOVA) confirmed that the two putative communities differed significantly in floristic composition from all locally mapped PCTs and from all plausible regional rainforest PCTs, with all p-values at or below 0.038 after false discovery rate correction. The results held under both Bray-Curtis and Gower dissimilarity indices, which treat Braun-Blanquet classes differently, demonstrating that the findings were not an artefact of metric choice. Permutational analysis of multivariate dispersion showed the new communities ranked among the tightest groups in ordination space, meaning their distinctiveness was not inflated by internal spread.

The team then ran their data through the NSW government’s Eastern NSW Plot to PCT Assignment Tool, the formal instrument used to meet regulatory obligations. The Tool returned best matches scattered across as many as eight different PCTs for the Gully plots and five for the Bench plots, with no coherent geographic or environmental story. The authors argue that such inconsistency, even when matches fall within the Tool’s statistical threshold of 0.695 distance-to-centroid, indicates a habitat the existing classification does not adequately capture. The 0.695 threshold, they note, represents the 95th percentile of distances for well-sampled PCTs and is designed to test statistical stability, not ecological distinctiveness. Floristically, the new communities sat closest to coastal rainforest types from the Illawarra and Central Coast regions, hundreds of kilometres away, rather than to any locally mapped rainforest.

Bryophyte data added an unexpected layer of discrimination. The 34 bryophyte species recorded separated the Gully and Bench communities in ordination space, with non-overlapping 95 percent confidence intervals around group centroids and a marginally significant PERMANOVA result. The moss Papillaria flavolimbata, which festoons tree branches in Bench rainforest, was never observed doing so in Gully rainforest, while several liverworts and hornworts such as Symphyogyna podophylla and Bazzania adnexa were restricted to creekside Gully sites. The authors suggest that integrating non-vascular plant data into community analysis could become a useful tool for Australian vegetation classification, though they caution that bryophytes varied more within communities than between them, likely reflecting fine-scale responses to moisture, substrate and light.

Spatial mapping revealed the true scale of the discrepancy. Using high-resolution aerial imagery, canopy height modelling and terrain analysis to isolate gullies and benches, then ground-truthing the output across two field campaigns, the team estimated a conservative minimum extent of 2,086 hectares of rainforest in the study area, against just 645 hectares documented in the SVTM. The overlap between the two mapping products was a mere 12 percent, implying the SVTM may carry a false positive rate exceeding 40 percent, which would push the actual increase in rainforest extent closer to seven or eight times the official figure. The team mapped over 40 distinct patches of Bench rainforest ranging from 1 to more than 30 hectares, and proposed two new vegetation types for inclusion in the PCT classification: ‘Hawkesbury Warm Sheltered Gully Rainforest’ and ‘Hawkesbury Subtropical-Dry Bench Rainforest’, intermediate forms bridging warm temperate, subtropical and dry rainforest.

The botanical significance of these communities is striking. Bench rainforest ranked highest in mean species richness among all regional rainforest PCTs with more than one reference site, and Gully rainforest ranked third. The communities harbour regionally rare species and notable range extensions, including the white cedar relative Dendrocnide photinophylla, apparently restricted to a single location with fewer than fifty living trees more than 100 kilometres from its nearest known population, and several hundred individuals of the Critically Endangered tree Rhodamnia rubescens across at least five populations. The team also recorded species such as Gmelina leichhardtii, Ficus henneana, Diospyros pentamera and Calanthe triplicata, many documented decades ago in botanical surveys of the Wheeny Creek area by ecologist Rosemary Floyd, whose historical records the authors argue were overlooked during the development of contemporary mapping.

The refugial story behind these rainforests is one of the study’s most compelling threads. As Australia drifted north and aridified from the Late Eocene, rainforest contracted under fire regimes favouring sclerophyllous species, persisting in pockets where conditions remained suitable. The Hawkesbury landscape, with mountain peaks receiving 1,200 to 1,300 millimetres of annual precipitation, deeply incised gorges and the semi-impermeable clay layers of the Burralow Formation acting as aquitards, appears to have buffered these assemblages from long-term climate drying and fire. The authors speculate that under past climates, more extensive rainforest links once existed between the Illawarra, Hawkesbury and Central Coast regions, dispersed along the hydrological conduit of the Hawkesbury-Nepean River and the movements of fruit-eating fauna.

That refugial buffering is now under threat. By 2090, the study region is predicted to warm by up to 3.4 degrees Celsius, lose up to 10 percent of annual rainfall and suffer more severe fire weather days. The Gully and Bench rainforests cover less than 1,000 hectares across four small subcatchments, making them acutely vulnerable to wildfires like those of 2019-2020, which affected hundreds of thousands of hectares. The researchers observed evidence that some rainforest patches within historical fire perimeters had been transformed into perpetual vine thickets with few large trees. Myrtle rust, the introduced pathogen Austropuccinia psidii, was consistently observed on Rhodamnia rubescens and other species, while invasive plants including Ochna serrulata and Lantana camara compete with threatened populations. Illegal four-wheel drive and mountain bike activity in the ridgetops of the Burralow, Wheeny and Gospers Creek catchments risks igniting unplanned fires and transporting weeds and pathogens into undisturbed areas.

The authors urge rapid revision of the PCT mapping and targeted measures to protect the remaining patches, warning that fires and urban development pressures will likely threaten the integrity of these rainforests in future. Prescribed burning is implemented across the region to reduce wildfire risk to lives and property, and rapid urban expansion is converting former rural lands to housing at the bushland interface, raising the probability of unplanned ignitions. Because 65 percent of the surveyed rainforest sites are officially mapped as sclerophyll forest, there is a material risk of off-target impacts from fire management activities within the World Heritage Area. The new community descriptions, diagnostic species lists and revised mapping provide land managers with the tools to plan burns around rainforest boundaries and to conserve what the authors describe as remnants that hold the stories of plant evolution over geological time, contributing more to the Outstanding Universal Values of the World Heritage Area than has previously been ascribed.

Subject of Research: Identification of distinctive new rainforest communities in the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area, Australia

Article Title: Identification of distinctive new rainforest communities in the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area, Australia

Article References: Bendall, E. R., Wong, V., Bell, S. A. J., & Gallagher, R. V. (2026). Identification of distinctive new rainforest communities in the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area, Australia. Vegetation Classification and Survey, 7, 103-125. https://doi.org/10.3897/vcs.186732

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/VCS.186732

Keywords: Identification, distinctive, rainforest, communities, Greater, Blue, Mountains, World, Heritage, Area, Australia, scientific research

Destruxins are cyclic hexadepsipeptides, ring-shaped molecules assembled from amino acids and hydroxy acids, that more than forty known analogs call home. They are the chemical weapons that Metarhizium fungi deploy against insect hosts, disrupting immune cells and muscle function, and they also mediate the fungus’s interactions with plants. Beyond agriculture, destruxins have attracted attention in medical research for antiviral, antimicrobial, anticancer, antiangiogenic, and immunosuppressive properties. Yet the environmental triggers that switch their biosynthesis on or off have remained murky, with reports in the literature sometimes contradicting one another.

The research team, led by Pamela Vrabl at the University of Innsbruck’s Institute of Microbiology, hypothesized that light might act not as a simple trigger but as a modulator whose effects depend on the nutritional state of the culture. This idea rests on a growing body of evidence from other fungi, including Aspergillus nidulans and Penicillium species, where the same wavelength can either boost or suppress secondary metabolite production depending on the medium. To test this in Metarhizium, the team grew the production strain M. brunneum BIPESCO 5 in 4.5-liter stirred-tank bioreactors under two radically different diets: a nutrient-rich Sabouraud medium with 4 percent glucose, and a defined minimal medium in which nitrogen was the limiting nutrient.

Each medium was subjected to five illumination regimes: complete darkness, red light centered at 660 nanometers, green light at 528 nanometers, and blue light at 455 nanometers, all delivered at an intensity of 1.4 milliwatts per square centimeter, plus ultraviolet-A irradiation at 340 and 375 nanometers at 1.1 milliwatts per square centimeter. LED panels were mounted in front of the glass bioreactor vessels and shrouded in light-tight fabric to prevent cross-contamination between treatments. Irradiance was verified with calibrated photodiode power sensors and spectrometers, ensuring that differences in output could not be attributed to sloppy light measurement.

Across 21 independent bioreactor batch cultivations, each run for 90 hours with triplicate sampling at ten time points, the fungus followed the classic growth pattern of filamentous fungi under carbon excess: a lag phase, exponential growth terminated by depletion of the first essential nutrient, a prolonged deceleration phase, and finally stationary phase. In the nutrient-rich medium, phosphate ran out first; in the minimal medium, ammonium did. Destruxin production began only after exponential growth had ended, consistent with the general principle that secondary metabolites accumulate once primary growth stalls.

The first major result concerned nutrition alone. Cultures grown under nitrogen limitation produced roughly twice as much destruxin A and B in absolute terms as those in the rich medium—up to 42.9 milligrams per liter of destruxin A and 22.7 milligrams per liter of destruxin B in darkness, compared with 19.1 and 8.6 milligrams per liter respectively in the rich medium. When normalized to fungal dry mass, the gap widened dramatically: nitrogen-limited cultures produced up to five times more destruxin A and nearly seven times more destruxin B per gram of biomass than their well-fed counterparts. This aligns with the long-standing observation that reduced nitrogen availability tends to elevate secondary metabolite levels in fungi, although the authors note that the regulatory role of nitrogen in destruxin biosynthesis remains incompletely understood and that published reports on the topic vary considerably.

The second and more striking result was that light did matter—but its direction flipped with the diet. In the nutrient-rich medium, shorter wavelengths enhanced production: cultures exposed to ultraviolet-A, blue, or green light produced significantly more destruxin A than those kept in darkness or under red light, and biomass-normalized destruxin B also rose significantly with shorter wavelengths. In the nitrogen-limited medium, the same short-wavelength treatments had the opposite effect, significantly reducing destruxin A and B levels relative to darkness and red light. Red light, by contrast, behaved much like darkness in both media. Destruxin E, the third analog measured, showed no significant light response in either medium, though its concentrations fluctuated wildly between replicate cultures—possibly because the molecule hydrolyzes into a related form called destruxin E-diol.

Perhaps the most telling detail lay in the ratios. Although light exposure swung the absolute concentrations of destruxins A and B up and down, the ratio between the two remained essentially constant within each medium—roughly 70:30 in the rich medium and 60:40 under nitrogen limitation—regardless of wavelength. Statistical analysis confirmed strong positive correlations between the two metabolites across all light treatments, with Pearson correlation coefficients reaching 0.94 in the minimal medium and 0.97 when data from both media were pooled. This pattern suggests that the biosynthetic pathway for destruxins A and B, whose genes are known to be clustered in the Metarhizium genome, is governed primarily by nutritional status, while light modulates the total flux running through it rather than rerouting it toward one product or the other.

The findings place destruxin regulation alongside a broader phenomenon in fungal physiology: nutrient-dependent light responses, in which the same photic signal produces different metabolic outcomes depending on carbon and nitrogen availability. Similar crosstalk has been documented for sterigmatocystin production in Aspergillus nidulans, where changing the carbon source could reverse whether light or darkness favored toxin synthesis, and for the antibiotic xanthoepocin in Penicillium ochrochloron. For Metarhizium, whose ecological repertoire spans insect pathogen, soil saprotroph, and plant-associated endophyte, such flexibility makes evolutionary sense: the fungus encounters everything from absolute darkness underground to green-light-dominated leaf surfaces and full sun, and its chemistry presumably adapts accordingly.

For biotechnologists, the practical implications are immediate. Destruxin yields in fermentation could potentially be increased by co-optimizing nutrient formulation and illumination regime rather than treating light as an afterthought, and shifting the product profile toward a preferred analog might become feasible by tuning the two variables in concert. The authors caution that mechanistic and scale-up studies will be needed before such strategies reach the production floor, and they emphasize that rigorous standardization of both cultivation and light conditions—wavelength and intensity alike—will be essential for untangling the molecular machinery underneath. What the study establishes beyond doubt is that destruxin biosynthesis is not a simple on/off switch but a finely tuned adaptive system, one that listens to both the menu and the light before deciding what to make.

Subject of Research: Nutrient-dependent effects of light wavelength on destruxin biosynthesis in the entomopathogenic fungus Metarhizium brunneum

Article Title: Nutrient-dependent influence of red, green, blue, and UV-A light on the production of destruxin A, B, and E in Metarhizium brunneum bioreactor batch cultures

Article References: Schobert, J., Erckert, S. A., Schinagl, C. W., Schöbel, H., Strasser, H., & Vrabl, P. (2026). Nutrient-dependent influence of red, green, blue, and UV-A light on the production of destruxin A, B, and E in Metarhizium brunneum bioreactor batch cultures. Frontiers in Photobiology, 4, Article 1753405. https://doi.org/10.3389/fphbi.2026.1753405

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fphbi.2026.1753405

Keywords: Metarhizium brunneum, destruxins, fungal photobiology, secondary metabolism, bioreactor cultivation, nitrogen limitation, light wavelength, entomopathogenic fungi, biological pest control, UV-A irradiation, biotechnology, fungal physiology

Blue carbon ecosystems — mangrove forests, salt marshes and seagrass meadows — sit at the interface between land and sea, making them exceptionally vulnerable to disturbance. They face tidal inundation and salinity gradients that shape which organisms can survive, while simultaneously absorbing the impacts of nutrient runoff, heavy metal contamination, coastal development, aquaculture and climate-driven warming. Each of these pressures acts as an ecological filter, removing or suppressing groups of microorganisms and favoring those able to tolerate the altered conditions. The central question of the new research is whether microbial communities, once reorganized by such filtering, retain the functional capacity to sustain the carbon sequestration that makes these habitats so valuable.

The researchers synthesized microbial community data across blue carbon habitats exposed to gradients of disturbance, examining the taxonomic composition and functional gene potential of the soil microbiomes. Their analysis focused on the distinction between the structure of a community — which microbes are present and in what abundance — and its function, the metabolic work those microbes perform. This distinction matters enormously for carbon cycling. Sulfate-reducing bacteria, methanogenic archaea, fermenters and complex-carbon degraders each occupy specific niches in the anaerobic soils of mangroves and salt marshes, and shifts among them can alter the balance between carbon burial and carbon emissions as carbon dioxide and methane.

What the study reveals is a picture of layered resilience. At the level of taxonomic identity, microbial communities proved surprisingly flexible: when one sensitive lineage was filtered out by salinity stress, pollution or warming, functionally similar organisms often expanded to fill the vacated niche. This phenomenon, known as functional redundancy, appears to act as a buffer, preserving core processes such as organic matter degradation, sulfur cycling and methane metabolism even as the cast of species changes. In disturbed sites, the researchers detected shifts toward stress-tolerant taxa — organisms equipped with genes for osmoprotection, heavy metal resistance and oxidative stress mitigation — without the wholesale collapse of the carbon-processing machinery.

That flexibility has a molecular basis that the study documents in detail. Microbial genomes recovered from these soils carry flexible gene pools that allow rapid adaptation. Processes such as horizontal gene transfer, gene copy-number variation and shifts in rRNA operon composition enable populations to tune their physiology to new conditions within relatively few generations. Because microbes reproduce on timescales of hours to days, evolutionary responses that would take larger organisms centuries can unfold in a single season. The study’s authors argue that this fast-evolving functional plasticity is precisely what allows blue carbon microbiomes to persist under chronic anthropogenic filtering that would extirpate macroscopic communities.

Yet the resilience is not unconditional. The analysis identifies thresholds beyond which redundancy fails. Where disturbance intensity crosses certain limits — for instance, when eutrophication and contamination co-occur, or when hydrological alteration fundamentally rewires the redox conditions of the sediment — the buffering capacity of the community erodes. Under these conditions, losses in microbial diversity translate into losses of functional pathways, particularly those responsible for degrading complex plant polymers such as lignocellulose. When that capacity declines, the efficiency of carbon preservation drops, and the methanogenic branch of the microbial food web can gain prominence, raising the risk of increased methane emissions from soils that were previously net carbon sinks.

The study also highlights the asymmetry between rapid microbial recovery and slow ecosystem recovery. Mangrove forests destroyed by clearing may take decades to regenerate their aboveground structure, but their soil microbiomes can begin reassembling within months once hydrology is restored. This means restoration practitioners who focus on replanting vegetation while neglecting soil conditions — salinity, sulfide concentrations, organic matter content — may be building forests on functionally impoverished microbial foundations. Conversely, the fast response of microbes offers an early-warning system: shifts in the relative abundance of sensitive versus tolerant taxa can signal degradation before visible damage appears in the canopy.

Methodologically, the work exemplifies the shift in microbial ecology from cataloguing taxa toward predicting function. By combining metabarcoding-based diversity assessments with metagenomic inference of functional gene potential, the researchers could ask not just who lives in these soils but what they are capable of doing, and how that capability changes along disturbance gradients. Statistical frameworks that decompose community variation into components explained by ecological filtering versus stochastic assembly allowed the team to quantify how deterministic pressures — the filters — reshape both composition and function. The approach is transferable to other stressed ecosystems, from hypoxic coastal zones to contaminated freshwater sediments.

The implications for climate policy are direct. Blue carbon habitats are increasingly included in national climate commitments and carbon credit schemes, with preservation and restoration framed as natural climate solutions. But the carbon accounting underlying these schemes assumes that buried carbon stays buried. If microbial filtering by pollution, warming or hydrological change compromises the anaerobic conditions and degrading communities that keep carbon in the ground, the sequestration rates credited to these habitats may be overestimated. The study therefore argues for incorporating microbial indicators into the monitoring protocols of blue carbon projects, moving beyond satellite-based canopy metrics toward soil-based functional assessments.

Ultimately, the research reframes how we should think about resilience in the climate-critical coastal zone. Blue carbon microbiomes are not passive casualties of human pressure, nor are they invulnerable. They are adaptive systems with genuine but bounded capacity to absorb filtering forces, maintaining the carbon-burying function of the world’s mangroves, marshes and seagrass meadows — until they cannot. Recognizing where that boundary lies, and managing coastal development, nutrient loading and warming within it, may determine whether these ecosystems continue to quietly perform one of the largest carbon sequestration services on Earth, or whether the microscopic machinery beneath our feet begins to give way.

Subject of Research: Resilience of blue carbon microbiomes in response to ecological and anthropogenic filtering

Article Title: Resilience of blue carbon microbiomes in response to ecological and anthropogenic filtering

Article References: Xiao, L., Liu, J., Tanentzap, A. J., Duarte, C. M., Fu, C., Zhou, L., Dang, R., Zhou, M., Luo, M., Zhang, P., Yu, J., Xu, Y., Rosentreter, J., Spencer, R. G. M., Lichtfouse, E., Luo, Y., & Han, G. (2026). Resilience of blue carbon microbiomes in response to ecological and anthropogenic filtering. Nature Communications. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-77867-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-77867-5

Keywords: Resilience, blue, carbon, microbiomes, response, ecological, anthropogenic, filtering, scientific research

The research arrives at a moment when maritime spatial planning, or MSP, has moved from an abstract academic concept to a binding legal obligation in many coastal states. The European Union’s MSP Directive, the marine spatial plans emerging across Asia, Africa and Latin America, and the target under the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity to protect thirty percent of the ocean by 2030 all demand planning processes that can weigh industrial development against ecological integrity. Yet in practice, planners frequently lack a structured way to answer a deceptively simple question: which sectors depend on which ecosystem services, and what happens to human well-being when those services are degraded or displaced?

The framework addresses this gap by treating blue economy sectors not as isolated actors but as components of a coupled social-ecological system. Each sector, whether it is offshore renewable energy, commercial fishing, maritime transport, aquaculture, tourism or emerging industries such as floating infrastructure and deep-sea resource extraction, is mapped against a portfolio of ecosystem services drawn from established classification systems. These include provisioning services such as food and raw materials, regulating services such as climate regulation and coastal protection, and cultural services such as recreation, heritage and identity. By making these dependencies and impacts explicit, the framework turns what has often been an implicit, intuition-driven judgment into a transparent and auditable analytical structure.

What distinguishes the approach from earlier attempts at integration is its insistence on the socio-economic dimension. Maritime spatial planning has historically been dominated by ecological and engineering considerations, with human dimensions added late in the process or treated as constraints on otherwise technical decisions. The new framework elevates socio-economic priorities to a co-equal pillar of the analysis. Employment, food security, income distribution, cultural values, gender equity and regional development objectives are positioned as the evaluative criteria against which the consequences of sector-service interactions are judged. This means that a planning decision is no longer assessed only by its effect on a habitat or a species population, but by its cascading consequences for the livelihoods and priorities that those ecological functions underpin.

Technically, the framework operates as a structured chain of linkage analysis. In the first stage, sectors are characterized by their spatial footprint, resource demands and pressures on the marine environment, including physical disturbance, pollution, noise, greenhouse gas emissions and biological impacts. In the second stage, ecosystem services are identified and located, often using spatially explicit data layers that show where services are generated and who benefits from them. The third stage constructs the dependency and impact matrices, recording for each sector-service pair whether the sector relies on the service, degrades it, enhances it or competes with other sectors for it. The fourth stage connects these interactions to socio-economic priorities through indicators that can be monitored over time, allowing planners to track whether a given allocation of ocean space is delivering on declared policy goals.

This chain-of-linkages logic has significant practical advantages for planning authorities. It enables cumulative impact assessment to move beyond simply summing pressures and instead to trace how combined pressures alter service flows and, ultimately, human welfare. It supports scenario analysis, so that planners can compare, for example, an aggressive offshore wind build-out against a more diversified allocation that reserves space for small-scale fisheries and coastal protection habitats. It also creates a common language for stakeholders who often talk past one another. A fishing cooperative, an energy developer and a conservation agency can each locate their concerns within the same framework, which reduces the translation problems that have historically made marine planning negotiations slow and adversarial.

The framework is also designed with trade-off analysis at its core. The ocean cannot simultaneously maximize every use in every location, and the concept of the blue economy has been criticized, in some quarters, for promising growth without acknowledging the hard choices that growth implies. By forcing explicit recognition of which services are lost, degraded or gained under alternative planning scenarios, and by tying those changes to named socio-economic priorities, the framework makes trade-offs visible rather than hiding them in aggregated cost-benefit figures. This transparency matters for legitimacy. Coastal communities that see how their priorities were weighed, and where their interests were traded against others, are more likely to accept planning outcomes than communities confronted with decisions that appear to have emerged from a black box.

The study speaks directly to several urgent global policy conversations. The sustainable blue economy agenda promoted by international organizations envisions ocean industries as engines of development, but that vision is credible only if the ecological base of the economy is maintained. The framework provides a mechanism for operationalizing this conditionality: sectors can grow, but the analysis shows where growth erodes the service foundation on which other sectors and communities depend. Similarly, ecosystem-based management, long a guiding principle in marine policy, gains a concrete implementation pathway. Rather than remaining an aspiration, ecosystem-based management becomes a set of defined linkages, indicators and decision points that can be embedded in statutory planning processes.

The timing of the publication is notable. Global commitments to offshore renewable energy are accelerating, aquaculture is the fastest-growing food production sector in the world, and shipping volumes continue to rise even as nations pledge to decarbonize maritime transport. Meanwhile, the recently agreed international agreement on biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction, together with expanding networks of marine protected areas, is adding new layers of regulation to ocean space. Planning systems that were built for a quieter ocean now face simultaneous demands for industrial expansion, biodiversity protection and climate adaptation. The framework offers planners a way to integrate these demands systematically, rather than resolving conflicts case by case after they erupt.

For researchers, the framework opens a research agenda as much as it closes one. The authors’ structure invites empirical application in specific seascapes, where data on service distribution, sector pressures and socio-economic indicators can populate the linkage matrices and reveal whether the framework performs as intended under real institutional conditions. It also invites methodological development: the integration of ecosystem service models with ocean observation systems, the use of participatory mapping to capture local and Indigenous knowledge of service flows, and the coupling of the framework with optimization and simulation tools that can search for planning allocations satisfying multiple priorities at once. As more jurisdictions adopt legally binding marine plans, the demand for methods that can demonstrate the consequences of those plans for both ecosystems and people will only grow. This study provides a credible, general-purpose scaffold for meeting that demand, and its true test will be how quickly it moves from the journal page into the planning rooms where the ocean’s future is actually decided.

Subject of Research: A framework linking blue economy sectors to ecosystem services and socio-economic priorities for integrated maritime spatial planning

Article Title: Linking blue economy sectors to ecosystem services and socio-economic priorities: a framework for integrated maritime spatial planning

Article References: Pegorelli, C., Rayo-Luengo, S., Garcia-Onetti, J., de Andrés, M., Stojanovic, I., & Sanabria, J. G. (2026). Linking blue economy sectors to ecosystem services and socio-economic priorities: a framework for integrated maritime spatial planning. npj Ocean Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44183-026-00238-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s44183-026-00238-6

Keywords: blue economy, maritime spatial planning, ecosystem services, ocean governance, socio-economic priorities, marine policy, offshore renewable energy, aquaculture, ecosystem-based management, npj Ocean Sustainability, Linking, blue