“I want to give people tools that help them think outside the box”

“Check it out! I have a cool lab coat. I’ve sewn some African fabric into it,” says Lina Mtwana Nordlund, pointing to a garment hanging on a hanger on the wall of her workroom at Campus Gotland.

What used to be an ordinary white lab coat has become something deeply personal. It keeps her close to her beloved Zanzibar, the island where she worked and her family has a home. In fact, East Africa is also where her research career – and fascination with seagrasses – began 20 years ago.

“I wanted to be a rainforest researcher, but then I started diving and working and became fascinated by coral reefs. Then I found a supervisor for my degree project who worked with seagrasses. After that, I went to Mozambique for a few months and learned a lot about seagrass,” says Lina Mtwana Nordlund, who is now a researcher at the Department of Earth Sciences.

She developed a particularly strong bond with the island world around Zanzibar early on. She spent some time as manager of the Chumbe Island Coral Park and was also head of education there. At the same time, she was working on her doctoral thesis on socio-ecological systems in coastal areas.

Studying our coastal systems

Today, her research field has broadened and takes a more holistic approach to marine issues. Her main focus is on the shallow sea areas close to land.

“The focus is very much on gaining an overall understanding of how our coastal systems in particular work, meaning how we humans use our coastal systems and how the coastal systems react to that and what then happens to us. It can be about fishing, tourism or really anything related to how we use or protect these environments,” explains Lina Mtwana Nordlund.

She is the coordinator of the EU project BioEcoOcean, which started in earnest at the beginning of last year. Its focus is on the development of an approach to support the development and coordination of how ocean observations and measurements are carried out so that they are comparable between different countries, research groups and managers. A key task is creating a question-based tool that can be used by anyone involved in ocean observations of marine life.

Making data available

But it is not easy. For example, seagrass is a variable that can be measured in marine observations. But what exactly should be measured? The height of the seagrass? How densely it grows? How much area it covers? The species composition? Or perhaps what other species live in and around it? Another question is where to collect the information.

“The problem is – not just for seagrass, but most marine life data – there are no data standards, so you can’t find the data. You can’t reuse it; it might disappear into someone’s drawer. So that’s something we’re working very hard on – making sure that the data actually collected is made available to perform global assessments and the like. It’s a lot of work, but also a lot of fun,” says Lina Mtwana Nordlund.

Seagrass ecosystems are environments that normally have a rich biodiversity in which all kinds of marine animals thrive. They are also important for the livelihoods of many people. Lina Mtwana Nordlund is interested in these relationships in her research.

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“A particular focus is on these socio-ecological interactions, meaning how we utilise seagrass systems and how activities such as fishing affect seagrass systems. There is quite a lot of fishing in seagrass. A lot of people, especially in poorer countries, are also extremely dependent on fishing for their survival. How much should you fish so that people still have food? If they also want there to be food available in two years’ time, you can’t take too much. There are many such trade-offs that we look at,” she explains.

Seagrasses effective carbon sinks

According to Lina Mtwana Nordlund, right now we know too little about the distribution of seagrasses. From the information the researchers do have, they can see a decline in seagrasses.

“Seagrasses are very effective carbon sinks, so it’s bad if they disappear. Especially here around Sweden’s coasts, they are also very good at stabilising the coast so that you don’t get a lot of erosion,” she says.

Through her research, she wants to contribute solutions and get us to start thinking much more positively about the future.

“I want to help people develop the capacity to think more interdisciplinarily. I also work a lot with future thinking, particularly something I call desirable futures. What do we want the world to look like? What do we want the sea to look like? What do we want the seagrass to be like in 10, 15, 100 years? It’s very easy to be negative or to think along the same lines as we do today. I want to give people tools that help them think outside the box. I often think we are a bit timid with our goals and visions. We have to be bold enough to think much, much bigger and much more daring,” says Lina Mtwana Nordlund.

Åsa Malmberg