Host: CWSS / SALTGARDEN / WADcouple

To organise and integrate the societal outreach of scientific projects, it is important to understand to whom and in which form our scientific work is relevant.

This workshop invites all 5 Wadden Sea projects to reflect upon their potential outreach and identify relevant and suitable products, respectively, integrate products across other projects. This workshop offers a guided reflection upon the relevance of individual project’s work in the context of the (trilateral) Wadden Sea Plan (2010) and the Integrated Management Plan for ONE Wadden Sea World Heritage (2023). Reflection upon its relevance in the trilateral context will be guided by Soledad Luna (CWSS). Identification of relevant output and its synthesis will be assisted by Heike Schwermer (Kiel University, SALTGARDEN) and Mansee Bal and Diana Giebels (University Olden-burg, WADcouple).

Potential participants are requested to develop a presentation of their societal outreach prior to the workshop.

Host: WADcouple

The WADcouple project is developing an online Wadden SES portal and accompanying MOOC to improve decision-making. Decision-making in the Wadden area involves many stakeholders. Ideally, these stakeholders have a shared basic understanding of the complexities of the Wadden area, both ecologically and socio-economically. In practice, such a shared understanding is missing. WADcouple is building a WaddenSES portal with an accompanying MOOC to repair that.

In this workshop, you will be invited to contribute your key insights via this SES platform and
MOOC. We will show the first version of the platform and discuss practical matters for contributing, while also taking the first steps to contribute during the workshop.

Background:
The Socio-Ecological Systems platform for the Wadden Sea Region (Wadden SES platform) will
bring together geographically based monitoring and data on different dimensions and themes of landscape quality. It aims to act as a central online point where selected key results from the five different projects in the call (PaRCA, SedWay, TRICMA, SALTGARDEN and WADWAD) are integrated with broader Wadden Sea science. For this a shared online environment is created that combines short videos, interactive maps and storytelling via so-called storymaps. Storymaps can seamlessly integrate text, photographs and interactive maps. Using storymaps specific key insights from the individual projects are combined with themes from other fields: combining 20–25 themes. To allow integration and synthesis of the project specific outcomes with the broader knowledge system of the Wadden Sea in the themes a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) is created that leads the users through the themes for ensuring the flowering of SES insight.

Host: SALTGARDEN

In this interactive workshop we collect an overview of the different models used in the Wadden Sea projects, the scenarios that are considered with these models and their expected output. From this overview, we aim to collectively identify ways to combine and synthesize prospective model outputs from the different projects into a joint –WADcouple– end product that can help to inform area managers and policy makers in the Wadden Sea region. At the same time this workshop will also help identifying opportunities to collaborate and combine modelling efforts across the projects.

We were thinking that this workshop could benefit from the presence of a cartoonist who can help to identify the connections between the different modelling efforts and to visualize how we can streamline these connections towards a joint end product. We do this a lot when we are preparing our research proposals (also SALTGARDEN) and it really helps. However, we would have to look for funding resources to make this work.

Host: Tricma2

The workshop will be divided into two halfs - during the first 45 mins, people from all projects
could contribute to this topic by giving short presentations (6 mins each; overall 6-7 presentations). The talks could touch either biotic or abiotic components of salt marshes under climate change. From TRICMA², we would contribute with insights from the in-situ warming experiment MERIT and from a mesocosm study carried out at AWI Sylt last year. In the second half, we would like to discuss knowledge gaps and try to come up with specific joint experiments to be carried out in the future.

Host: WADWAD

This break-out group invites all social scientists from the different projects to present their research approaches and/or field work on sediment and salt marshes. The session will be structured by presentations about our different research methods and areas. We will also discuss the potential to develop a common paper or special issue on our work and brainstorm about common outreach to policy and decision-making.

Interested participants are invited to send a title of their presentation until 15.04.2026 to the organizers of the break-out group. Participants who would like to join without presenting their research and participants from other disciplines are also welcome, of course.

Host: WADcouple

Wadden has always been a teacher with its teachings spanning from ecological diversity to societal integrity to coinhabit the place in harmony for ages. We have an opportunity and a goal, through the 6 Trilateral Wadden Sea Research (PaRCA, SedWay, TRICMA2, SALTGARDEN, WADWAD, WADcouple), to relearn their interrelationships with focus (currently) on sediment dynamics, salt marshes, and ecology, besides, protection and management approaches. The collective memory of the shared commons needs collective action to listen, learn, and live with the changing dynamics of the interlinked social and ecological systems. The collective action towards integrating the knowledge systems for science, policies and people requires thinking and planning for implementing. The workshop calls for a brainstorming on governing the collective action to cocreate collective knowledge.

The interactive session will be in following parts from individual to collective inputs. Firstly, we shall briefly discuss the principles of coworking for integrating knowledge on Wadden protection and management towards sustainability. Secondly, we deliberate upon the long-enduring design principles for sustainable governance of commons developed and experimented by Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom and Ostrom Workshoppers from across disciplines, sectors, and regions around the world. We shall deep dive in groups into the eight design principles namely, defined boundaries of knowledge cocreation; proportional equivalence between benefits and costs between individuals and collective; collective-choice arrangements to codevelop, curate, and circulate; monitoring the process and progress; graduated approvals and sanctions; conflict-resolution mechanism; recognition of rights to organize; and nested enterprise. Finally, we shall altogether decide upon the coworking principles to integrate the diverse knowledge sets, ideas, thoughts, focusses, methods, locations, experiments, models, etc. In addition, come up with a collective action plan for the documentation and dissemination of the coproduced knowledge.

Host: Sedway

The protection of natural processes is at the heart of the conservation objectives for the Wadden Sea, as defined in the criteria for assessing the Outstanding Universal Value of the World Heritage site. In particular focus, are the complex interactions between geomorphological, ecological, and biological dynamic processes. Yet dynamic, process-based conservation goals remain underdefined, leading to an overreliance on static indicators in conservation policy and practice. In this session, we seek to discuss the meaning and specification of naturalness and natural dynamics from multiple disciplinary perspectives, while taking full account of anthropogenic pressures and the legacy of past interventions. We welcome theoretical, empirical and practical contributions to an inter- and transdisciplinary dialogue on this topic.

We want this to be a joint initiative across the natural and social science and were thinking about 15–20 people to work on this.