Abstract
Due to the expansion of sustainable use of the oceans within the framework of the Blue Growth Strategy, and the expected increase in marine natural hazards such as harmful microorganisms or hypoxia in consequence to climate change, the socio-economic relevance of marine biological hazards and their prevention will increase in the future, also for German coastal waters. Currently, there is no jointly coordinated strategy among coastal states in Germany to address this societal challenge. Moreover, there is a lack of efficient, flexible, widely accessible, user-friendly observation technology. This makes it difficult to monitor the occurrence of marine biological hazards at appropriate spatial and temporal scales tailored to society's needs for early warning systems to prevent and minimize socioeconomic impacts. PrimePrevention aims to provide knowledge and technical solutions for monitoring and predicting the occurrence of marine biological hazards in order to derive recommendations for actions to protect society from their economic and health impacts, also considering cascading effects from additional marine extremes. The establishment of a smart and flexible ocean observation strategy that is suited to serve the observation needs of individual stakeholder groups is at the heart of PrimePrevention. In the first phase, observation and prediction methods will be developed exemplarily for selected biological hazards (Cyanobacteria, Vibrio spp. and hypoxia) in the western Baltic Sea, which will be the basis for recommendations on early warning systems