The coastal ocean has been increasingly recognized as a dynamic component of the global carbon budget. This session aims at fostering our understanding of the roles of coastal environments and of exchange processes, both natural or perturbed, along the terrestrial / coastal sea / open ocean continuum in global biogeochemical cycles. During the session recent advancements in the field of coastal and shelf biogeochemistry will be discussed. Contributions focusing on carbon and nutrient and all other element's cycles in coastal, shelf and shelf break environments, both pelagic and sedimentary, are invited.

A subsection of this session will be devoted to the question of how long-term changes in land (and marine) management practice impact on carbon storage and transfer in the coastal ocean. Despite of significant efforts to quantify terrestrial carbon stocks in recent years, the marine components (‘blue carbon’) are less well defined, but may themselves contain a very large store of sedimentary carbon. An important emerging research priority is to therefore understand and to quantify sources, transports and fate of carbon in the coastal sedimentary environment and to understand the long-term stability of the marine sedimentary carbon pool.

This session is multidisciplinary and is open to observational, modelling and theoretical based studies in order to promote the dialogue.