lnfluence of Accidental Oil Spt//s on the Microbial Biodiversity in Surface Water and Sediments of the Baltic Sea rn the Warm and Cold Period

The Baltic Sea is unique among the seas of the world, characterizing with the busiest maritime traffic, with a high population along its coast area and with the specific unique ecosystem. Large rivers from highly industrialized and agriculturally intensive countries flow into it and, therefore, bringing high loads of agricultural nutrients (like nitrogen and phosphorous) and hazardous compounds (herbicides, antibacterial agents, oil products, phenolic chemicals etc.) with, but, from the other side, resulting flow of the big amount of river water to the sea and due to that the sea water became low salinity comparing with the other seas in the world and characterizing, in fact, as a brackish water. At the same time the coastal area ecosystem is unique, fragile and sensitive, people enjoy it for recreation, the tourism is important business area. The Baltic Sea hosts a variety of economic activities and provides income for those who work on and around it. Identification and quantification of risks arising from intensive exploitation of sea will lead to rational management of natural resources. It is obvious that the pollution rate for the Baltic Sea is a crucial point of environmental risk arising. It is possible only to predict what kind of disasters (ecological catastrophe) would be arising in case of big oil tanker accident. Therefore, there is an urgent need to know environmental risk assessment issues, especially concerning natural biodegradation rates and specific oil degrading microbes possible to use, for example, for the bioaugmentation performances. Because of the complexity of the problem these tasks are not suitable to resolve in one particular country. The only productive and effective way here could be to use international cooperation between different research institutions and countries, hopefully under the umbrella of an international project.
Aim: The main goal of the proposed project is to elucidate the biodegradative potential of microbial communities in the Baltic Sea sediment and surface water samples both at the warm and cold climate periods and to find out and to change the current fragmented picture of the biodegradative ability of the bacterioplankton in the Baltic Sea in order to facilitate to development of modern in situ bioremediation and bioaugmentation strategies (Figure 1). Beside to the overall picture there is need to isolate, characterize and settle the safety requirements and control ways for isolated oil derived petroleum hydrocarbons (PHCs) degrading bacteria before use of them in open environment. This kind of information is pre requirement for problem solving approach in case of clean up the polluted environments and needed for the firms interested to develop ready to use products at the accidental oil spills. The international co-operation and added values of expertise of the different research laboratories working in the field are necessary to resolve the objectives pursued in the project OILMICROB. Partners have very different scientific and technical backgrounds and it is clear that the resources needed are unavailable to the individual partners or at a national level. On the other hand, the work needs strong co-operation among the partners since every portion of the project is tightly linked to the others.