On August 13, 2026, the research vessel “Elisabeth Mann Borgese (EMB)” departed from Rostock on Expedition EMB401 under the lead of the IOW. The main objective of the expedition is to identify areas at risk for harmful algal blooms. On board: a 13-people team of researchers from the IOW, the Alfred-Wegener-Institute (Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research, AWI), the Institute for Chemistry and Biology of the Marine Environment (ICBM, Oldenburg, Germany), the University of Warsaw (Poland), Linnaeus University (Kalmar, Sweden), and the Marine and Freshwater Research Institute (Reykjavík, Iceland).

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.