The surface turbulent transport processes in the central Baltic Sea during summer are investigated using Lagrangian trajectory simulations forced by an operational ocean model and Finite Size Lyapunov Exponent (FSLE) and related diagnostics of horizontal stirring. The spatial distribution of Lagrangian Coherent Structures (LCS) and the local prevalence of attracting versus repelling LCS are presented. Coastal areas are characterised by strong stirring in contrast to the weakly stirred offshore regions. The along-trajectory absolute value of relative vorticity and total strain attest to the important role of eddies, fronts and jets in driving horizontal stirring in the ocean model. Strong asymmetry in LCS distribution between the eastern and western coast of Gotland is found and its consequences on the transport of algae blooms and pollutants are discussed.
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) often face challenges in managing data privacy due to limited resources and a lack of specialized expertise. The NIST Privacy Framework provides a structured foundation for identifying and managing privacy risks, yet it offers limited practical guidance on how to operationalize its components in resource-constrained settings. This study adopts a Design Science Research approach within a Stockholm-based start-up to examine SME-specific privacy challenges and develop a structured solution.The study proposes a tailored privacy management framework that operationalizes the NIST implementation tiers as a cumulative maturity roadmap and provides actionable guidance for practical implementation. The framework is instantiated in a lightweight web application to support structured planning, task prioritization, and communication of privacy posture. The design further integrates considerations relevant to assurance readiness, including alignment with SOC 2. Evaluation through stakeholder interviews and a practitioner survey indicates that the proposed artefacts enhance privacy awareness, enable actionable planning, and provide practical value for SMEs seeking structured privacy management.
Benthic organisms can act as bioindicators of microplastic pollution in aquatic environments by enabling a time-integrated assessment of the ambient particles suspended in the water column. We employ a geostatistical approach using data of microplastics concentrations found in tissue of the barnacles and benthic fauna collected by Xu et al. (2020a, 2020b) to estimate the spatial extent of marine microplastics pollution in Hong Kong. This paper therefore uses data from two previously published studies and no new samples were collected or new experiments conducted. Regional pollution maps are generated which demonstrate the highest marine microplastics levels occur in the northeast bays and regions adjacent to the Pearl River Delta, indicating terrestrial pollution as a source. We conclude that some classes of benthic fauna and in particular barnacles and gastropods, may provide a pragmatic tool to assist with pollution assessments that are based on contamination levels measured in the environment, which are typically transient.
Most shallow-water methane seeps studied in the Svalbard-Barents Sea region fall within relatively warm and saline Atlantic water masses which have been hypothesized to impact epimegabenthic species composition and select against chemosymbiotrophic fauna. Seeps on the shelf off Svalbard's southernmost fjord Hornsund are subject to colder Arctic water masses, which theoretically could favor chemosymbiotrophic fauna, but were nonetheless devoid of chemosymbiotrophic siboglinids. It is likely that the region is still exposed to Atlantic water masses; our CTD data captured high salinity values which suggest transformed Atlantic water. Furthermore, water masses are highly dynamic in this region; Atlantic water intrusions might be common, favoring fauna directly dependent on phytodetrital material over chemosymbiotrophic species. Current community composition could also represent a recent transition since Atlantic water presence has increased over the past few decades. Otherwise, epimegabenthic community composition of this shallow-water location resembled that of many other Arctic seeps, consisting of background benthic taxa. Four nudibranch morphotaxa were seen, including the kelp or rocky substrate associated species Edmundstella pedata, which has never been observed north of mainland Norway, nor on soft sediment before. This highlights the extent to which non-invasive, image-based methods can reveal about benthic fauna, including significantly expanding distribution ranges and providing novel insight into habitat associations.
We present a surrogate modeling strategy for Stokes flows with liquid droplets suspended in a carrier fluid. Our approach is based on a multi-fidelity framework. At the lowest fidelity, droplets are treated as passive tracers, neglecting their influence on the ambient flow field. Building on this approximation, we derive a PDE that represents the current modeling error. This error equation is then solved approximately to correct the flow field and the procedure is iterated. Two fidelities are employed in an alternating fashion: Stokes flow in the absence of droplets and flow around a single droplet in free space. By systematically combining these models, the method captures droplet-flow, droplet-boundary, and droplet–droplet interactions. In this work, the framework is developed and validated for circular, non-deforming droplets in two spatial dimensions. The geometric self-similarity of the droplets allows us to construct an efficient offline–online strategy based on the reuse of precomputed single-droplet solutions. Extensions to deformable droplets are also discussed. Numerical experiments demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed surrogate in a variety of tests, including scenarios with up to 104 droplets. Notably, we show that the proposed surrogate achieves substantially reduced computational cost compared to fully resolved multi-fluid simulations with state-of-the-art software.
