NOWESP - North West European Shelf Project

The North-West European shelf is one of the world's largest and its waters belong to the best studied areas of this kind. However no insight exists into the long term evolution of the shelf system and no reliable estimates are available regarding the net retention or release of matter. The NOWESP project was an integrated project in this area.
The project objectives were:
- to quantify the biogeochemical fluxes, such as the fluxes of nutrients, plankton, carbon, and the transport of organic and inorganic particulate matter, including their biological and chemical modifications.
- to estimate their variabilities and trends.
- to understand the nature of shelves as a link between land and ocean.
NOWESP integrated and analyzed existing European data sets. From these integrated data sets the project aims to make an assessment of the fluxes of energy and matter, as well as their variability.
NOWESP provided a state-of-the-art of present-day knowledge on shelf fluxes in the North-West European Shelf and clarifies the priorities of further field measurements and model developments from the viewpoint of fluxes.