Are HABs and their societal impacts expanding and intensifying? A call for answers from the HAB scientific community

Hypotheses, evidence and questions about the global expansion and increasing impacts of HABs have been put forward since the first recognition of these phenomena by international scientific fora. After about four decades of ever intensifying research and monitoring activity, the HAB scientific community is called to put together the data on the occurrence of harmful species and on their impacts that have so far been collected at local scales and analyze them in a regional and global perspective. The Global HAB Status Report Initiative (GHSR) aims at producing an overview of HAB events and their societal impacts; GHSR will combine the effort of Regional Groups, International Agencies, ISSHA and individual scientists in a large scale exercise towards a worldwide appraisal of the occurrence of toxin-producing microalgae, along with an assessment of the status and probability of change in HAB frequencies, intensities, and range resulting from environmental changes at the local and global scale.