IMARES - Wageningen IMARES

Wageningen IMARES (IMARES) is a non-profit privatised research organisation and part of Wageningen University and Research Centre (WUR) and is one of the premier nature and fisheries research institutes in Europe. Wageningen IMARES is the result of a merger between the Netherlands Institute for Fisheries Research (RIVO), the Marine Research department of Alterra and the water quality department of TNO. IMARES has a staff of approximately 190 employees and an average turn over of €20 million per year. Research is carried out through 4 departments of which ‘Environment’ is the department that will be engaged in this project. The institute is able to draw on a wide experience in the fields of marine biology and ecotoxicology, empirical trends in the North Sea system, fish stock assessment and the provision of management advice.

Wageningen IMARES provides knowledge that is essential for the sustainable use and management of the sea and saline coastal areas. The focus is on strategic and applied ecological research relating to economic developments that respect the sea’s ecology and environmental values. The field of work comprises a wide variety of issues, e.g.: sustainable fisheries, development of new forms of aquaculture, effects of windparks, oil and gas production, subsea CO₂ storage, sand extraction, intrusion of saline water in land areas used for agriculture or the production of drinking water, restoration of brackish transition areas, coastal defence, large-scale land reclamation for harbour industries, development of Marine Protected Areas in response to the Bird and Habitat Directives, implementation of EU marine strategy and the Water Framework Directive and environmental risk assessment. The research is focused on changes introduced by human intervention as well as to natural changes, and their effects on ecosystem dynamics, assessment of (profitable) functionality and multifunctional use from an ecological perspective, protection of marine ecosystems, and the development of management systems, and provision of advice based on policy scenario’s for the marine environment.

 

IMARES will be leading workpackage 2 with a focus on marine experimental and field (effect-) studies, contributing to that workpackage with a series of impact and recovery studies with stagnant marine mesocosms. IMARES will further contribute to workpackage 4, introducing the tiered approach to environmental risk assessment of CO₂ exposure, including the determination of Species Sensitivity Distributions (SSD's) for CO₂.