SEA-Quester 2026 GA: Åland Islands

SEA-Quester partners jumped on planes, trains, and ferries to travel to the Åland Islands for their third General Assembly (an annual gathering where all institutions meet physically). Big thanks to Anna, Phoebe, Christian, Christoffer, and Tom with Åbo Akademi and the Husö Biological Station for hosting us!

This year, sessions focused on specific deliverables instead of more general work package updates. This allowed plenty of time for breakout groups to tackle specific outputs, and group discussion in plenum about synthesis papers, policy events, and other outputs.

We started off the week with an “ECR-Day” – where 12 SEA-Quester PhD students and Post-Docs joined GRID-Arendal for a media training workshop and a quick crash course in making Instagram reels. Just ask them about the 10 elements of newsworthiness, when to say “off the record” and how important capturing good quality audio is for Social Media! After lunch, ECRs split up to film and bring their ideas to life, followed by a short hike up to a lookout tower in the forest.

On Tuesday, the rest of the consortium arrived, and we started off with a morning of presentations from ECRs: they covered everything from benthic biodiversity and carbon sequestration depth models to why palaeoceanography is “geology cosplaying as biology” to phytoplankton optics. We also heard about work on capturing the second phytoplankton bloom from Rafa and about winners and losers from AMOC collapse in Arctic fisheries from Amber.

The remainder of Tuesday afternoon was focused on internal work package discussions and a helpful tutorial from our data management expert Karolina Gorn on the GeoNetwork. All notes and presentations are available on NextCloud.

Day 2 focused on cross-WP outputs and discussions, including reviewing fact sheets on Emerging Ecosystems, plans for a special issue journal for research from the Oceania cruise, upcoming milestones, and synthesis papers (zooplankton and sequestration). We also heard from our sister project POMP on their recent policy-relevant work and from our Advisory Board member Michael Karcher on the launch of Beyond Arctic PASSION. Our other advisory board member Debbie Steinberg also tuned in.

We had 3 entries for our annual “fermentation contest” – Helmuth submitted a sourdough bread, Eva submitted a beer from her PhD celebration, and Emily submitted homemade Kimchi (which won!). Not to be outdone, the Husö chefs also submitted local fermentation products, including fish sauce. We capped the day with a visit to the Bomersund fortress (or what was left of it) and a tour of the Åland Islands own Distillery!

Before parting ways on Day 3, we showcased the ECR’s handiwork in a mini “Reel Film Festival” and discussed which storylines (key messages developed throughout the project) should be incorporated in our upcoming exhibits (more educational and evergreen) or factsheets for policymakers (focused on “innovation” and new findings). It was a tight race, but ultimately, Aarhus was selected as next year’s GA location by one vote! Looking forward to seeing everyone for our final meeting in Denmark in 2027. Skål!