Introduction

R/V Meteor Cruise FACEiT

INTRODUCTION

FACEiT - Fast Advanced Cellular and Ecosystems Information Technologies Short summary: Marine and freshwater ecosystems continue to be threathened by large scale pollution disasters. Such disasters are often caused by oil-related activities, but pollution nature, magnitude and site of occurrence all can be very different, with unpredictable outcome on the responses of individual organisms, the biodiversity and the functioning of the aquatic ecosystems. Proper disaster management requires a multifaceted approach, including pollution prevention, remediation technologies, biological effect prediction and ecosystems� restoration or natural attenation. The FACEiT project will contribute to disaster management strategies by developing innovative biomonitoring technologies while using physicochemical analyses only as validation. The main disaster target of FACEiT will be oil pollution. Biomonitoring development will concentrate on increasing the rapidity and reliability of cellular detection systems, on finding new cellular and ecosystem�s markers to analyze and predict the potential effects of pollution disasters, and to assess the potential for self restoration of ecosystems. In order to reach this purpose, FACEiT will develop and test biotools on different levels of biological complexity. FACEiT will also address pollutant disaster effects at the level of the ecosystem. Here, the consortium will develop methods to detect diversity changes, to understand the response of marine microbial communities to oil disasters and to predict the potential for natural attenuation. In order to validate the newly developed biomonitoring technologies, the FACEiT project will compare the effectivity of the methods among eachother and with existing physicochemical methods on two occasions directly in the field. The last one, cruise to the North Sea, will involve both sampling in-and outside the shipping route, as well experiments on board with oil contamination.