From August 25–28, 2026, IOW oceanographer Michael Naumann, together with Taavi Liblik, physical oceanographer and head of the Division of Marine Physics at Tallinn University of Technology (TalTech, Estonia), conducted a measurement campaign to test autonomous measuring devices in shallow waters off the coast of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania near Warnemünde. The campaign is part of the IOW’s “Shore to Basin” (S2B) research cluster on shallow water processes, which focuses on investigating the shallow coastal zones of the Baltic Sea—an area that has received little research attention to date.

Microbial communities are highly sensitive to environmental changes, yet their enormous diversity makes it difficult to identify ecological patterns. A research team from the IOW has now shown that an AI method originally developed for text analysis can be successfully applied to the analysis of complex environmental samples. The method identified five seasonally successive microbial sub-communities in the Warnow estuary while preserving ecological and functional information just as well as conventional methods – in some cases they even performed better.