Since 1993, the IGBP project "Land-Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone (LOICZ)" has studied Earth's heterogeneous, relatively small but highly productive, dynamic and sensitive coastal zone. During its first decade of research, LOICZ focused on the measurement of biogeochemical fluctuations into, and within, the coastal zone. Now in its third year as a joint IGBP/IHDP core project, LOICZ has evolved into an interdisciplinary collaborative effort of several hundred coastal zone scientists and managers within a wide spectrum of Earth System Sciences, from biochemical and geophysical to social and economic dimensions. With its primary objective "to provide the knowledge, understanding and prediction needed to allow coastal communities to assess, anticipate and respond to the interaction of global and local pressures, which determine coastal change", LOICZ is an important promoter of interdisciplinary coastal zone research around the globe.

Value added by LOICZ to the multiple globally executed individual scientific activities and the scientific community in general is largely in its interdisciplinary capacity. By bringing together leading scientists of a variety of areas in coastal research as part of a regular implementation strategy, LOICZ fulfils its mandate to mainstream future scientific directions and to provide a forum for development of cutting edge research questions. This is orchestrated in such a way that disciplinary experts are explicitly encouraged to cross traditional boundaries and foster integrative research on coastal change and human dimensions. As a result of this continued scientific discourse, LOICZ enables and harmonizes research that aims to provide the answers to the key questions as part of its implementation.

Aiming to overcome traditional disciplinary fragmentation, in particular between natural and social sciences, LOICZ organizes the biochemical, geophysical and human dimensions of coastal change around five scientific themes and three priority topics and cross-cutting activities.

IHDP Core Project

Currently in Implementation