Challenges for Sustained Observing and Forecasting Systems in the Mediterranean Sea

The Mediterranean community represented in this paper is the result of more than 30 years of EU and nationally funded coordination, which has led to key contributions in science concepts and operational initiatives. Together with the establishment of operational services, the community has coordinated with universities, research centers, research infrastructures and private companies to implement advanced multi-platform and integrated observing and forecasting systems that facilitate the advancement of operational services, scientific achievements and mission-oriented innovation. Thus, the community can respond to societal challenges and stakeholders needs, developing a variety of fit-for-purpose services such as the Copernicus Marine Service. The combination of state-of-the-art observations and forecasting provides new opportunities for downstream services in response to the needs of the heavily populated Mediterranean coastal areas and to climate change. The challenge over the next decade is to sustain ocean observations within the research community, to monitor the variability at small scales, e.g., the mesoscale/submesoscale, to resolve the sub-basin/seasonal and inter-annual variability in the circulation, and thus establish the decadal variability, understand and correct the model-associated biases and to enhance model-data integration and ensemble forecasting for uncertainty estimation. Better knowledge and understanding of the level of Mediterranean variability will enable a subsequent evaluation of the impacts and mitigation of the effect of human activities and climate change on the biodiversity and the ecosystem, which will support environmental assessments and decisions. Further challenges include extending the science-based added-value products into societal relevant downstream services and engaging with communities to build initiatives that will contribute to the 2030 Agenda and more specifically to SDG14 and the UN's Decade of Ocean Science for sustainable development, by this contributing to bridge the science-policy gap. The Mediterranean observing and forecasting capacity was built on the basis of community best practices in monitoring and modeling, and can serve as a basis for the development of an integrated global ocean observing system

Challenges for Sustained Observing and Forecasting Systems in the Mediterranean Sea

The Mediterranean community represented in this paper is the result of more than 30 years of EU and nationally funded coordination, which has led to key contributions in science concepts and operational initiatives. Together with the establishment of operational services, the community has coordinated with universities, research centers, research infrastructures and private companies to implement advanced multi-platform and integrated observing and forecasting systems that facilitate the advancement of operational services, scientific achievements and mission-oriented innovation. Thus, the community can respond to societal challenges and stakeholders needs, developing a variety of fit-for-purpose services such as the Copernicus Marine Service. The combination of state-of-the-art observations and forecasting provides new opportunities for downstream services in response to the needs of the heavily populated Mediterranean coastal areas and to climate change. The challenge over the next decade is to sustain ocean observations within the research community, to monitor the variability at small scales, e.g., the mesoscale/submesoscale, to resolve the sub-basin/seasonal and inter-annual variability in the circulation, and thus establish the decadal variability, understand and correct the model-associated biases and to enhance model-data integration and ensemble forecasting for uncertainty estimation. Better knowledge and understanding of the level of Mediterranean variability will enable a subsequent evaluation of the impacts and mitigation of the effect of human activities and climate change on the biodiversity and the ecosystem, which will support environmental assessments and decisions. Further challenges include extending the science-based added-value products into societal relevant downstream services and engaging with communities to build initiatives that will contribute to the 2030 Agenda and more specifically to SDG14 and the UN's Decade of Ocean Science for sustainable development, by this contributing to bridge the science-policy gap. The Mediterranean observing and forecasting capacity was built on the basis of community best practices in monitoring and modeling, and can serve as a basis for the development of an integrated global ocean observing system

A MSFD complementary approach for the assessment of pressures, knowledge and data gaps in Southern European Seas : the PERSEUS experience

PERSEUS project aims to identify the most relevant pressures exerted on the ecosystems of the Southern European Seas (SES), highlighting knowledge and data gaps that endanger the achievement of SES Good Environmental Status (GES) as mandated by the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD). A complementary approach has been adopted, by a meta-analysis of existing literature on pressure/impact/knowledge gaps summarized in tables related to the MSFD descriptors, discriminating open waters from coastal areas. A comparative assessment of the Initial Assessments (IAs) for five SES countries has been also independently performed. The comparison between meta-analysis results and IAs shows similarities for coastal areas only. Major knowledge gaps have been detected for the biodiversity, marine food web, marine litter and underwater noise descriptors. The meta-analysis also allowed the identification of additional research themes targeting research topics that are requested to the achievement of GES. 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license.peer-reviewe

Highly isoxanthohumol enriched hop extract obtained by pressurized hot water extraction (PHWE): Chemical and functional characterization

Hop (Humulus lupulus) is one of the richest natural sources of a prenylfalvonoids such as xanthohumol (XN), desmetylxanthohumol (DMX), isoxanthohumol (IX) or 8-prenylnaringenin (8-PN), being XN the most abundant of them in the raw material. So far, obtention of prenylflavonoids have been done by chemical synthesis or extraction with organic solvents, with no described methods for the isolation of IX, which has been reported to have anti-inflammatory properties. In this study, pressurized hot water extraction (PHWE) it is shown not only as effective method to extract some prenylflavonoids but to selectively change the relative amount of them, favoring the extraction of IX against XN. Thus, pressurized water extraction at 150 °C showed a high selectivity towards IX, being proposed as a method to enrich natural hop´s extracts in IX. On the other hand, the extracts thus obtained were chemically characterized and evaluated for their anti-inflammatory activity, which was higher than the expected by its content in IX.This work has been funded by a CICYT Project (AGL2007-64198/ALI), CONSOLIDER INGENIO 2010 CSD2007-00063 FUN-C-FOOD (MEC) and ALIBIRD-CM 2010–2013 INGREEN.Peer reviewe

Thermodynamic modeling of dealcoholization of beverages using supercritical CO2: Application to wine samples

The supercritical removal of ethanol from alcoholic beverages (brandy, wine, and cider) was studied using the GC-EoS model to represent the phase equilibria behavior of the CO2 + beverage mixture. Each alcoholic drink was represented as the ethanol + water mixture with the corresponding ethanol concentration (35 wt% for brandy, 9-12 wt% for different wines and 6 wt% for cider). The thermodynamic modeling was based on an accurate representation of the CO2 + ethanol and CO2 + water binary mixtures, and the CO2 + ethanol + water ternary mixture. The GC-EoS model was employed to simulate the countercurrent supercritical CO2 dealcoholization of the referred beverages; the results obtained compared good with experimental data from the literature. Thus, the model was used to estimate process conditions to achieve an ethanol content reduction from ca. 10 wt% to values lower than 1 wt%. The model results were tested by carrying out several extraction assays using wine, in a 3 m height packed column at 308 K, pressures in the range of 9-18 MPa and solvent to wine ratio between 9 and 30 kg/kg. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.Peer Reviewe