The five awarded projects of the trilateral Wadden Sea call together generate novel and state-of-the art knowledge about the Wadden Sea morphology, salt marshes, sediment dynamics and ecology and co-produce pathways, action plans and decision-making support for future climate-robust and adaptive management. The societal relevance and impact of all generated outcomes is guaranteed through the early involvement of societal key stakeholders in each of the individual projects. However, the integration of knowledge across projects is not assured, nor is a coordinated dissemination of integrated insights being organized.
This WADcouple-project aims for effective use of scientific insights for policy and learning for sustainability via a carefully designed co-creation process. Three different layers of integration and dissemination will be created to achieve this. First, active integration of research plans and newly acquired knowledge will be facilitated through workshops, online research meet-ups, and capacity training for transdisciplinarity among the researchers in the individual projects. Secondly, active integration of those societal actors that are not yet represented in the individual projects will be organized through regular short online meetings for industry stakeholders and for the full Quintuple Helix. Thirdly, further integration of research output with cutting-edge scientific insights from other domains will be employed. This layer of integration includes testing the robustness of the Östrom's socio-ecological systems framework in the context of the Wadden Sea and development of an online SES portal based on so-called storymaps and a Massive Open Online Course allowing integrated learning about key socio-ecological Wadden themes.