Reducing nutrient loadings from agricultural soils to the Baltic Sea via groundwater and streams (Soils2Sea)

• New methodologies for the planning of differentiated regulations based on new knowledge of nutrient transport and retention processes between soils/sewage outlets and the coast.
• Evaluation of how differentiated regulation can offer more cost efficient solutions towards reducing the nutrient loads to the Baltic Sea.
• Analysis of how changes in land use and climate may affect the nutrient load to the Baltic Sea as well as the optimal location of measures aiming at reducing the load.
• A high-resolution model for the entire Baltic Sea Basin with improved process descriptions of nutrient retention in groundwater and surface water tailored to make detailed simulations of management regulations differentiated in space.
• New knowledge based governance and monitoring concepts that acknowledge the relevant aspects of EU directives and at the same time are tailored towards decentralised decision making. The proposed spatially differentiated regulations will aim for incorporation of local scale knowledge to optimally design solutions.

Funding

Soils2Sea receives Funding from BONUS, the joint Baltic Sea research and Development programme (Art 185), funded jointly from the European Union's Seventh Programme for research, technological development and demonstration and from the Danish Council for Strategic Research, The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency (Naturrådsverket), The Polish National Centre for Research and Development, The German Ministry for Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, and the Russian Foundation for Basic Researches (RFBR). Soils2Sea is part of a cluster of BONUS Projects.