Interactive data visualization of Baltic Sea health and environmental resource management.
The Dashboard is a data exploration tool, for visualizing the results as well as input data and intermediate metrics from the BHI assessment.
View the Dashboard:
The Baltic Health Index is a regional study under the global Ocean Health Index framework. The aim is to maintain and continually improve a fully-transparent tool that can be used by decision-makers to guide management of the Baltic Sea region towards increased sustainability. We strive to use the best open source tools available, to make our data preparation, results, calculations, reference levels and underlying data easily accessible and entirely transparent (read more about this: Better Science in Less Time).
As of January of 2019, we began working on our second Baltic Health Index assessment! We will be building on the earlier goal models, making improvements where possible, and including new datasets where relevant. We hope also to be able to conduct scenario testing and sensitivity analysis, create features for interactive data exploration/presentation, and assess interconnectivity of goals.
Oceans provide a diverse array of benefits to humans, often with tradeoffs between benefits. Managing these requires a method that can measure the health status in both a comprehensive and quantitative way. Establishing such a method was the motivation behind development of the Ocean Health Index.
The Baltic Health Index is a regional study using the OHI method but tailored to assess the health status of the social-ecological system of the Baltic Sea. It is an independent, fully-transparent, scientific index which quantifies the status and trends of nine benefits based on inputs from scientists with expertise in each goal area, and stakeholder perspectives. The assessment of the nine benefits includes food provision, artisanal fishing opportunity, natural products, carbon storage, biodiversity, clean water, tourism, livelihood and economy, sense of place.
Funding for the BHI2.0, started January 2019 and ongoing, comes from the Johansson Family foundation and partly from the Formas-funded project “When the sum is unknown - a concrete approach to disentangle multiple driver impacts on the Baltic Sea ecosystem”(led by Thorsten Blenckner). The first phase was funded by the Johansson Family foundation and the Baltic Ecosystem Adaptive Management, BEAM, a five-year research programme (2010-2014). The project is jointly led by Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC), at Stockholm University, Sweden together with the Ocean Health Index team. The BHI project is a purely scientific driven project, without any political narratives and no financial interest.
This trans-disciplinary project is led by Thorsten Blenckner at Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University and involves many international management organisations and researchers from around the Baltic Sea. Members of the team conducting the first assessment (started in 2015 with preliminary scores completed in 2017) additionally included Jennifer Griffiths, Ning Jiang, Julie Lowndes, Melanie Frazer, and Cornelia Ludwig. Currently, the second assessment is conducted by Eleanore Campbell, Andrea De Cervo, Susa Niiranen and Thorsten Blenckner.
Explore the BHI on GitHub:
Baltic Health Index
Functions for calculating Status and Trend
Video about following BHI progress in GitHub
Data preparation
Learn more about the Ocean Health Index:
Ocean Health Index
Ocean Health Index Science
BHI at the Stockholm Resilience Centre
BHI data preparation document