From August 17 to 24, 2026, the Baltic Earth Research Network held its twelfth summer school at the Stockholm University Baltic Sea Center’s field station on the Swedish skerry island of Askö. A total of 16 international students from Germany, Sweden, Finland, Lithuania, Estonia, and Denmark traveled to the event to participate in lectures, seminars, and exercises on the climate of the Baltic Sea region, physical oceanography, coastal marine processes, and science communication.

Microbial communities are highly sensitive to environmental changes, yet their enormous diversity makes it difficult to identify ecological patterns. A research team from the IOW has now shown that an AI method originally developed for text analysis can be successfully applied to the analysis of complex environmental samples. The method identified five seasonally successive microbial sub-communities in the Warnow estuary while preserving ecological and functional information just as well as conventional methods – in some cases they even performed better.