Hosted by Judith Matz and Sina Acksen

The ongoing increase in greenhouse gas emissions is driving climate change and intensifying its impacts. In addition to strong emission reductions, achieving net-zero emissions will require measures to address hard-to-abate residual emissions. Carbon dioxide removal is therefore considered a necessary complement to mitigation efforts. Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal (mCDR) comprises a range of approaches that aim to enhance the ocean’s uptake of atmospheric CO₂. Given the ocean’s central role in the global carbon cycle, mCDR approaches may offer potential, although they are also associated with significant scientific, technical, and societal uncertainties.

The aim of this session is to advance understanding of different mCDR approaches. A key emphasis lies on Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) – tools and methods to track how much carbon is removed, how long it remains stored, what side effects could occur – and on transparently communicating outcomes and uncertainties to a wide audience, including academic peers, decision-makers, and the public. We especially invite contributions that analyze uncertainties in mCDR monitoring and verification, explore methodological limitations, or propose innovative approaches to improve MRV frameworks. This includes introductory analyses, preliminary ideas, or questions from those new to the field, as we aim to foster learning and collaboration.

Whether you’re testing ideas in a lab, running models, studying policy impacts, or exploring societal dimensions: your work fits here. Contributions from cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives are strongly encouraged, including work from oceanography, ecology, engineering, economics, policy, law, and the social sciences. Responsible development and potential deployment of mCDR can only be achieved through collaboration across disciplines. This session is a space to learn, network, and grow; aiming to provide a forum for early career researchers to share insights, methods, and results, and to engage in constructive discussion on key challenges, trade-offs, and open questions surrounding marine carbon dioxide removal.

Hosted by Svenja Frey and Tabea Rahm

The ocean plays a central role in global climate change mitigation, taking up about 25 % of anthropogenic carbon and 90 % of excess heat. At the same time, the ocean itself is increasingly under stress as climate change affects it on all scales through warming and changes in circulation, shifts in carbon uptake and storage, and resulting impacts on marine ecosystems.

This session brings together early-career researchers across various disciplines to explore marine heat and carbon dynamics within the broader context of ocean-climate interactions. We invite contributions that examine how climate change affects ocean processes and ecosystems, and how ocean heat and carbon uptake feed back on the global climate. Topics may include (but are not limited to) marine heat and/or carbon storage and transport; circulation changes; marine heatwaves; changes in the biological carbon pump; biogeochemical impacts; atmosphere–ocean fluxes; ecosystem responses; cascading ecological and socioeconomic consequences; and implications for climate mitigation and adaptation.

We welcome presentations addressing a range of anthropogenically driven climate changes, from currently ongoing and continued future global warming to net-zero and net-negative emissions scenarios. Studies may span scales from local to global, and employ diverse approaches including numerical modelling, remote sensing, in-situ observations, ecosystem surveys, data-driven and machine-learning methods, as well as policy or monitoring frameworks.

This session is designed as a supportive forum for cross-disciplinary exchange. Together, we can contribute to a clearer and more integrated view of changes in marine heat and carbon and their implications, and hope to inspire new collaborations across the ICYMARE community.

Hosted by Kim Maria Mächler

The Southern Ocean is one of the key regulators for the global thermohaline circulation and the general global climate system. Due to atmospheric and marine interaction, it is globally one of the most significant sinks for CO2. Due to the anthropogenically-driven global warming, the Southern Ocean and its biogeochemical cycle are undergoing rapid changes, risking the balance of the whole ecosystem.

The biogeochemical carbon cycle is one part of this bigger system, that is connected to many climate-driven processes. These include e.g.: Changing sea ice dynamics affecting primary production; freshwater inputs by increased melting of the Antarctic ice shelves; influencing stratification and upwelling processes; ocean acidification endangering calcifying microorganisms, an important part of the marine food web and carbon export; or climate-driven changes at the air-sea-interface, shaping gas exchange processes or its carbon uptake capacity.

However, many feedback mechanisms within the Southern Ocean’s carbon cycle are still unknown. To better predict future scenarios and ecological consequences, the processes within the pelagic and benthic biogeochemical carbon cycle, as well the fluxes between these, must be better understood. We aim for a greater understanding of the biological pump and the burial of carbon in Southern Ocean sediments. Identifying historical shifts and differentiating between natural variability and anthropogenic causes using isotopic proxies or sedimentary records is crucial for this goal.

This session focuses on the biogeochemical processes in the Southern Ocean. Different perspectives on modern changes and data, as well as palaeoceanographic reconstructions with different methods are welcome. We welcome diverse and interdisciplinary methodical approaches, from research fields such as microbiology, geochemistry or physical and biological oceanography.

Hosted by Milan Beck and Lola Nader

When it comes to climate change and global warming, few areas are experiencing the effects at the same speed and intensity as the polar regions. The Arctic in particular is inherently a region of extreme change and environmental opposites represented by huge seasonal temperature and light amplitudes with complete darkness and cold during the polar night and permanent sunlight in summer. Furthermore, the Arctic is warming four times faster than the global average, an unprecedented rate. This rapid change is bound to amplify seasonal differences even more with some of the main environmental drivers being: rising temperatures, precipitation rates, sedimentation, and the effects of retreating glaciers and sea ice loss. In 2024, around 1% of the total ice volume on Svalbard melted in just one year, emphasizing the speed at which change is taking place. In an environment where organisms are already being challenged in their upper and lower physiological tolerance limits, it becomes apparent that further environmental stress will be a driver for change. Understanding how this will affect biological communities physiologically in the long- and midterm future is of utmost importance in order to identify potential trends, tipping points and bottle necks in Arctic regions. To achieve this, we have to combine field monitoring with experimental data regarding the physiology of ecologically important species in the marine Arctic habitat under climate change. This session aims to bring together early career researchers from the field of marine biology working on experimental, observational and modelling approaches. We call for contributions to deepen our understanding of the state of Arctic ecosystems and how ocean warming-driven changes cascade across trophic levels and habitat-forming species.

Hosted by Emma Stempel and Hanna Rittinghaus

Life in our oceans is connected through trophic interactions between taxa of all shapes and sizes. With primary producers at their base, these food webs facilitate the transfer of energy and cycling of nutrients in the pelagic sphere. Abundances and community compositions are subject to seasonal patterns and fluctuations.

However, climate change disrupts these natural patterns with direct effects such as ocean warming and changes in pH, as well as more indirect effects of biogeographical shifts in species distribution. This poses considerable challenges for many species, affecting behaviour, abundance, distribution and more. Events that primarily affect one part of the food web have the potential to also influence other parts due to the connection between different trophic levels. Thus, it has become more important than ever to fully understand the components of different food webs to enhance their conservation.

This session aims to explore the different impacts on food webs across regions and taxa. We invite any contributions by early career researchers that advance our understanding of the patterns and drivers of ecosystem changes and their possible future effects on our pelagic food webs. We are looking forward to great presentations, posters, and discussions on these topics!

Hosted by Sofia Amieva Mau and Malgorzata Dembek

Planktonic larval stages of marine organisms (meroplankton) are an important, but extremely sensitive, phase in many benthic and demersal organisms’ life cycles. Larval survival during this phase is highly sensitive to predation pressure, fluctuating food availability, and changes in physical and chemical environmental conditions, all important to recruitment success and therefore also population dynamics. Sustained patterns of larval recruitment can drastically affect the composition of communities, the functioning of ecosystems, and the availability of marine resources that are of ecological and economic significance.

Climate change, including ocean warming, acidification, and disruptions of pelagic food webs, is rewiring reproductive timing, larval growth and development, dispersal networks, and predator-prey dynamics in marine ecosystems. Such changes can have implications for larval dispersal, settlement efficiency, species connectivity and distribution, benthic-pelagic connectivity, and overall ecosystem resilience. Our knowledge about these dynamics is limited by the scarcity of long-term data needed to characterize variability across long time scales and shifts across ecosystems.

The purpose of this session is to gather colleagues in the area of marine larval ecology that study changes in the environment as determiners of meroplankton physiology, ecology, and dispersal patterns. We are interested in new evidence from laboratory experiments, field observation, and numerical modeling in a wide variety of meroplankton taxa. The combined insights of all these contributions will deepen our knowledge of how future recruitment dynamics and marine community structures may evolve.

Hosted by Anish Paul

Behaviour mediates the interaction between an organism and its environment. Behavioural decisions made by individuals can cascade upwards, shaping their contributions to ecosystem functions and processes. Thus, monitoring behaviour can provide first insights into organismal responses to rapid environmental and anthropogenic changes.

Local stressors, such as anthropogenic nutrient pollution, and global disturbances, including temperature-induced mass-bleaching events, continue to imperil both benthic and pelagic marine ecosystems. These human-induced rapid environmental changes are altering both the top-down and bottom-up processes in marine ecosystems, which can have far reaching consequences on their ecological integrity. Under such a scenario, studying marine organismal behaviour can, on the one hand, provide essential ecological insights on ecosystem functions and processes, and on the other hand help predict the fate of these systems in the face of recurring disturbances.

Join this session, in which I welcome contributions from all areas of marine behavioural research, including but not limited to bioenergetics and movement ecology, trophic interactions and food-web ecology, predator-prey ecology and evolutionary ecology. This session aims to create a platform for in-depth exploration of marine behaviour and its causes and consequences. Together, we will try to tackle critical questions in marine behavioural research: How do marine organisms behave under environmental stress? What can behavioural research tell us about fate of ecosystems in future ocean conditions? How can we use behavioural ecology as an indicator to examine environmental stress on ecosystems? Be part of this important conversation and share your research, thoughts, insights and ideas to create a collaborative space on shaping the future of marine behavioural ecology.

Hosted by Elisabeth Rosselli

Phytoplankton is frequently referred to as an invisible forest. Despite their microscopic size, phytoplanktonic organisms are responsible for the production of half of the Earth’s oxygen, as well as the oxygenation of the oceans. They also form the foundation of the marine food chain. Although indispensable, these organisms are particularly affected by climate change. From the poles to the tropics, rising ocean temperatures, eutrophication and effects of the anthropogenic pollution of the oceans have been observed. As a result, new phytoplankton dynamics have emerged, both along coastlines and at high sea. At the ecosystem level, a shift in species composition has already been observed, demonstrated by the transition from diatoms to dinoflagellates. Furthermore, algal blooms, some of which are toxic, are proliferating on a global scale, impacting multiple taxa, including humans, and thus resulting in serious socio-economic consequences. At the cellular level, physiological changes have been observed. Photosynthesis and growth mechanisms, amongst many more, were shown to be affected by climate change. The objective of this session is to shed light on the transformations occurring in phytoplankton due to all climate change consequences, ranging from large to very small scales. An interdisciplinary approach to this topic is therefore proposed, bringing together ecologists, ecotoxicologists, microbiologists and other interested researchers, with the aim to developing a complementary overview of the latest scientific knowledge in this area.

Hosted by Chandni Sidhu

Marine bacteria underpin oceanic food webs and exert strong control over the transformation, retention, and loss of organic carbon. Marine environments across coastal-to-offshore gradients are currently undergoing rapid change due to climate-driven warming and stratification, as well as increasing human interventions such as offshore wind energy installations that modify regional hydrodynamics, particle fluxes, and phytoplankton-bacteria interactions. Despite their central role, bacterial processes remain underrepresented in assessments of how marine systems will respond to these combined pressures.

This session aims to highlight recent advances in understanding bacterial responses within marine systems undergoing physical and biogeochemical change, with particular emphasis on regions influenced by altered mixing regimes, enhanced particle formation, and shifting primary production associated with offshore wind farms. We welcome contributions ranging from field studies and experiments to omics-based and modeling approaches that link bacterial community composition and metabolism to carbon processing pathways. By placing bacteria at the centre of discussion, this session seeks to emphasize how microbial processes will shape the future fate of carbon in marine environments under accelerating environmental change.

Hosted by Daniela Da Silva and Thilo Appeldom

Marine ecosystems are shaped by a wide range of organisms and their interactions. These so-called symbioses may enable organisms to acquire food and energy, secure a habitat or assist reproduction. Marine symbioses are diverse in both form and function, ranging from integration within a holobiont to predation in megafauna species. These crucial interactions can shape evolution and ecosystem functioning on large scales.

However, the stability and functioning of many key marine symbioses are increasingly threatened by human influence, such as ocean warming, habitat destruction or overfishing, contributing to the ongoing decline of several ecosystems. Mitigating environmental stressors at both local and global scales is therefore essential to ensure that these partnerships endure under global change. Effective conservation and restoration strategies could protect our planet’s valuable marine biospheres, but rely on a fundamental understanding of the establishment, biodiversity and mechanisms that sustain symbiotic interactions. Such strategies can aim to counteract the negative effects of human activities to preserve symbiotic balance, or leverage changing conditions to foster new or altered relationships that improve organisms’ adaptive potential.

This session focuses on the nature, mechanisms and conservation strategies associated with marine symbioses under environmental change. We invite young researchers to share empirical-based research and conceptual approaches on the functioning and conservation of marine symbioses and their connected ecosystems in an ever-changing ocean.

Hosted by Nikolas Kappas and Friederike Gronwald

Marine macroalgae are the cornerstone of many coastal benthic ecosystems and yet often get overlooked. In recent years, their role in climate mitigation and the provision of ecosystem services has received more attention, leading to a greater number of funded projects, such as afforestation and the protection of macroalgae dominated habitats. Next to their already substantial socio-economic importance in some parts of the world, where they drive coastal economies through job creation and provide food security, the industrial use of macroalgae has also been on the rise in Europe. A new market for macroalgae based products, including cosmetics, animal feed, dietary supplements, super foods, and gelatine alternatives has opened with a broadening range of algae-focused start-ups in Europe.

This session aims to provide a platform for everyone working with marine macroalgae; be it their ecology, physiology or their industrial use and restoration efforts.

Hosted by Fedor Lishchenko and Elizaveta Vlasova

Molluscs are an extremely flexible group of animals, both in terms of physical traits and ecology. Some of them are encased in highly durable shells, while others rely on speed or exceptional camouflage. They vary from active nektonic predators to sessile filter feeders; they inhabit marine and freshwater, abyssal depths as well as littoral and even terrestrial biotopes.

Similar to the flexibility of molluscs, the fields of molluscan research are very diverse, with some research areas intensively developing, while others remain significantly understudied for decades. Even in the case of commercially exploited species, some baseline topics are lacking. Then, what can we expect from less iconic classes of molluscs, such as polyplacophorans and scaphopods? The biggest challenge in research remains the lack of a systematic and integrative approach to studying Mollusca as a holistic group.

We see this session as a platform for broad discussion on molluscan research. The key topics of the session include but are not limited to: comparative and functional morphology, reproductive biology and development, age and growth, environmental and trophic ecology, fisheries, conservation and management. In the past, collaboration has allowed us to identify knowledge gaps not only in our own studies, but also in the field of molluscan research more broadly. Now, we wish to scale up this collaborative approach. We welcome any early-career researchers with an interest in molluscs to join the discussion on this topic.

Hosted by Julia Jacoby, Dennis Klüh and Derya Akdogan

The vast deep-sea habitat is home to remarkable and as of yet mostly undiscovered biodiversity. It is notable for extreme conditions with a high degree of endemism and plays an important role in biogeochemical cycling. Nonetheless, it is rapidly changing and threatened by anthropogenic pressures like climate change, pollution and resource extraction.

For this session, we want to encourage early-career scientists with a focus related to deep-sea to join the discovery of our planets least explored environment. With growing public interest in topics like commercial deep-sea mining, we believe it to be more important now than ever to shine a light into the dark unexplored depths!

This session combines a broad spectrum of research areas and methodologies. We invite ecologists, climatologists, microbiologists, oceanographers and every other line of research connected to the deep-sea, as we aim to promote the exchange of important and interesting topics and encourage all participants to take part in this urgent discussion.

Hosted by Adrian Schoerghofer and Frederico Scaramuzza

Marine ecosystems are structured by time as much as by space, yet ecological theory often assumes that ecosystems frequently operate in non-equilibrium, history-dependent regimes, where biological responses to environmental forcing are delayed, transient, and scale-dependent. From intracellular oscillators to population cycles and community turnover, temporal organisation mediates how environmental variability is translated into ecological structure. This holds true for time scales spanning from hours to orbitally driven climatic changes. Despite the importance of temporal structure being well recognised within individual fields, vital interdisciplinary discussion on the topic of biological timing is still underdeveloped.

This session aims to bring together perspectives on temporal organisation in marine ecology, molecular and cellular clocks, organismal rhythms, population synchrony, and community-level and ecosystem-scale dynamics. We invite contributions that explore

• how biological timing mechanisms interact with environmental cycles (day/night, tides, lunar cycles, and seasonality),
• how temporal coordination influences fitness and ecological interactions,
• how time-structured processes propagate across levels of organisation and are disrupted through anthropogenic activity.

By integrating insights across scales and disciplines, this session aims to promote a view of time as a central dimension for marine ecosystems, with direct implications for research and biodiversity management under rapid environmental change.

Hosted by Dilara Diken

Marine organisms represent a tremendous source of biodiversity that can provide original research models to the workbench. Not only can they help us understand mechanisms underlying evolution, regeneration, and development, but also their idiosyncratic features used in adaptation to specific habitats can be a source of inspiration for biomimicry. For these reasons, in the past, marine research models have fed a broad spectrum of disciplines such as evo-devo. However, in the recent decades these fascinating organisms are also helping us to understand our own limitations and human diseases. At present, marine research models are still underrepresented in traditional fields outside of marine biology. Nevertheless, by harnessing the experimental and sustainable valorization of marine research models, we can advance interdisciplinary research and answer pending gaps in the literature like what mechanisms confer extreme longevity to some of these organisms. This session is to encourage Early Career Scientists (ECS) who explore marine organisms as research models in the laboratory to share their work and to highlight the importance of bringing novel model systems into various domains of research.

Hosted by Alizée Wagner and Laura-Marie Dehne

The ocean is host to a large array of ecosystems, all posing their own specific challenges on the individuals inhabiting them, which range from small micro-organisms to large pluricellular organisms and encompass all branches of the phylogenetic tree. Survival in any given ecosystem is built on a multitude of factors, but can ultimately be traced back to an individual’s physiology and morphology, and how those have allowed the organism to adapt to its environment. Morphological and physiological processes can happen at the level of a whole organism, but also at a smaller scale, e.g. on a cellular level or on the level of a specific tissue in an organism.

Thus, understanding marine life and ecological behaviour requires a multi-level approach to evaluate how morphological traits enable physiological processes which ultimately dictate the ability of an organism to survive.

This session invites early career scientists of all fields to share research on the physiology and/or morphology of marine organisms, and how environmental challenges may have affected them. It also seeks to introduce innovative methods to study physiology or morphology on various scales, from the cellular level to whole organism studies. We strive to create connections between the observed behaviour of an organism and its underlying morphological and physiological characteristics.

Hosted by Rosa María Vergara González and Konstantin Mrozik

Interdisciplinary collaboration is one of the things that makes science so powerful and exciting today, and the ocean is a unique place to show how physics can make these connections stronger.

Our understanding of the ocean and the Earth System as a whole relies heavily on interdisciplinary approaches. Physics, Chemistry, biology, geology, and many other fields all contribute essential pieces to the bigger picture.

And the ocean specifically provides an interesting example of this, because all other disciplines are heavily influenced by our understanding of marine physics. All life forms living in the water column are constantly affected by currents and ocean flows. All chemical tracers are transported by large circulation and local phenomena like upwelling or downwelling. Even seismic studies need a basic knowledge about physical properties of seawater and their evolution, and in turn, these studies help refine our understanding of ocean structure. Bathymetry and geological features both shape and are shaped by the dynamics of the ocean as well.

With this session we want to dive deep into the understanding of these physical aspects and how they interact with other branches of marine science. But it doesn’t end there: our goal is to make this session a place where to exchange ideas, methods and results in the realm of marine physics. It might be a biological study using physical methods from seismology, purely theoretical research on sea-ice interactions on a global scale, or any contribution bridging disciplines. We are open to a wide spectrum of talks.

Our purpose is also to build and strengthen the bridge between Physics, Modelling, Geoscience and Biogeochemistry. Physics is one of the most fundamental fields governing all oceanic processes, so we want to highlight that importance and shed a light on this field as a base of all the global system interactions.

Hosted by Laura Grzonka

Ocean currents, surface and internal waves, turbulence, and wave–ice interactions govern the transport of energy and momentum in the ocean. These processes drive mixing, mass transport, air–sea and ice–ocean exchanges, shaping both large-scale circulation and local, highly nonlinear dynamics. Yet, despite being rooted in well-known physical laws, many key processes in sea dynamics remain extremely difficult and computationally demanding to predict. Today, this gap is increasingly addressed by first-principles models combined with machine learning.

Classical approaches – such as theoretical derivations, numerical analysis, and field or lab observations – have brought us far. The strong foundation they provide becomes even more valuable and effective when coupled with data-driven discovery.

The goal of this session is to bring together these perspectives and explore how physics-based and machine learning methods can be combined to advance physical oceanography. We welcome contributions that utilize first-principles models, numerical simulations, field or laboratory observations – especially physics-informed and hybrid approaches – to better understand and model the ocean dynamics.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Surface and internal waves,
• Ocean currents, turbulence, and mass transport,
• Wave–sea ice interactions and the Marginal Ice Zone,
• Dynamics of floating or submerged bodies,
• Engineering and offshore applications.

Coupled systems and interdisciplinary research on sea dynamics are strongly encouraged, as many of the current most pressing challenges – from the design of resilient marine infrastructure to climate-driven changes in the ocean dynamics – need to be evaluated from multiple perspectives.”

Hosted by Ingrid Cardenas and Laura-Maríe Dehne

Remote sensing enables observations across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales, both on land and in aquatic environments. A diverse suite of sensors is now available, from drone-mounted platforms that resolve habitat structure and organismal features at centimetre-scale resolution, to aerial surveys that connect coastal mosaics, and multispectral and hyperspectral satellites that reveal regional to global patterns. Increasingly, these platforms are also used to reconstruct three-dimensional structure, allowing spatial information to be translated into models of form, volume, and complexity. Together, these approaches underpin research across marine, coastal, and watershed systems.

In this session, we aim to explore how early-career researchers are using remote-sensing and spatial approaches to advance their research, while critically examining the challenges involved in translating pixels, point clouds, and models into data-driven understanding. Beyond mapping and pattern detection, we are interested in how remote sensing is used to generate and interpret three-dimensional representations of environments and organisms, and how these representations are linked to ecological or biological meaning through validation and complementary data.

We invite contributions from researchers using a broad range of sensing techniques, including multispectral and hyperspectral imaging, thermal sensors, LiDAR, synthetic aperture radar, UAV-based photogrammetry, and 3D reconstruction workflows. Relevant applications include habitat mapping, water-quality assessment, biogeochemical and physical processes, ecosystem change, and organism-centred studies that link spatial observations to body form, condition, behaviour, or movement. Emphasis will be placed on studies that integrate multiple platforms, address scale mismatches, or combine remote sensing with in-situ measurements or biological sampling.

Equally important, this session provides space for open discussion of the limitations and uncertainties inherent to remote sensing and 3D modelling approaches. Issues such as cloud cover, turbidity, depth penetration, sensor resolution trade-offs, reconstruction error, and the need for robust validation remain fundamental challenges.

Hosted by Diajeng Wulandari Atmojo and Daniel Lukats

The era of big data in Marine Sciences comes with diverse observational products, reanalyses and climate model data. As Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) gain more popularity in Marine Sciences, AI/ML have the potential to leverage these high-dimensional data to reveal hidden patterns and accelerate discoveries in Marine Sciences beyond conventional approaches. This session aims to explore innovative AI/ML applications and developments of AI/ML methods that address key challenges in Marine Sciences. We welcome abstracts spanning observational and modelling approaches focused on, but not limited to:

• Identification of patterns and features in oceanic fields such as phytoplankton blooms and community composition using spectral information
• Computer vision tasks such as classification and detection of marine mammals using visual and/or audio data
• Filling observational gaps of in-situ or satellite observations
• Automating quality control of data
• Explainable AI applications to Marine Data and Ocean Modelling
• Interpretable ML to discover a physically constrained equation from observations or model data
• Hybrid models (physically informed ML, emulation, data-model integration)

We encourage Early Career Scientists both from domain and data science fields, as well as those interested in the application of AI/ML methods to attend and participate in this session.

Hosted by Julian Esteban-Cantillo

Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) have emerged as a cornerstone of ocean conservation under international frameworks such as the Convention on Biological Diversity. In parallel, a growing suite of marine conservation strategies, including area-based measures, dynamic management tools, and sector-specific regulations, have been developed to address escalating pressures on marine ecosystems. Despite these efforts, biodiversity loss, ecosystem degradation, and climate-driven changes continue at alarming rates, highlighting the limitations of predominantly static, spatially fixed conservation approaches and underscoring the urgent need for innovative alternatives.

This session aims to provide a platform for exploring emerging and unconventional strategies for marine conservation that move beyond traditional MPAs. We invite contributions that critically assess the effectiveness, scalability, and governance challenges of novel approaches, including but not limited to dynamic ocean management, vertically integrated conservation, mobile or seasonal protection measures, ecosystem-based, species-based, and connectivity-driven designs, and the integration of ecological modelling, remote sensing, and socio-ecological data into conservation planning. Particular emphasis is placed on approaches that explicitly account for ocean dynamics, species mobility, and climate variability.

We welcome contributions by early-career researchers from diverse geographic regions, and particularly encourage bold, forward-looking work that reimagines how marine ecosystems and their species can be conserved in the Anthropocene.

Hosted by Sara Krause and Aihnoa Lopez

With ongoing global declines in marine populations, ecosystems, and biodiversity driven by increasing anthropogenic pressures, effective marine conservation and management are more urgent than ever to protect our oceans and the marine life they sustain. Genetic and genomic approaches provide powerful tools to inform marine conservation, offering a wide range of applications. Current uses include assessing genetic diversity to guide restoration efforts and evaluate the status of endangered species; applying environmental DNA (eDNA) for non-invasive biodiversity monitoring; using genetic forensics to combat illegal fishing, trade and seafood mislabelling; supporting sustainable harvest of commercial species by informing fisheries stock structure; assessing adaptive potential and resilience to climate change; and contributing to effective design of Marine Protected Areas using genetic and ecological connectivity information.

Despite long-standing use and the rapidly expanding availability of genomic data, genetic approaches remain underrepresented in applied marine conservation and management. Thus, this session aims to bring together researchers applying a broad range of genetic and genomic tools across marine systems, with the overarching goal of supporting meaningful conservation and management measures. Given the broad applicability of genetic approaches, the session welcomes diverse case studies and methodological advances spanning a wide variety of species and ecosystems. In particular, it encourages interdisciplinary contributions that integrate genetics with ecology, climate science, and policy, highlighting the versatility and potential of genetic insights and tools in marine conservation.