Abstract
The demand for freshwater is projected to increase worldwide over the coming decades, resulting in severe water stress and threats to riverine biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, and services. A major societal challenge is to determine where environmental changes will have the greatest impacts on riverine ecosystem services and where resilience can be incorporated into adaptive resource planning. Both water managers and scientists need new integrative tools to guide them toward the best solutions that meet the demands of a growing human population but also ensure riverine biodiversity and ecosystem integrity. Resource planners and scientists could better address a growing set of riverine management and risk mitigation issues by (1) using a ‘virtual watersheds’ approach based on improved digital river networks and better connections to terrestrial systems, (2) integrating virtual watersheds with ecosystem services technology (ARtificial Intelligence for Ecosystem Services: ARIES), and (3) incorporating the role of riverine biotic interactions in shaping ecological responses. This integrative platform can support both interdisciplinary scientific analyses of pressing societal issues and effective dissemination of findings across river research and management communities. It should also provide new integrative tools to identify the best solutions and trade‐offs to ensure the conservation of riverine biodiversity and ecosystem services. WIREs Water 2015, 2:609–621. doi: 10.1002/wat2.1106This article is categorized under: Water and Life > Conservation, Management, and Awareness
Highlights
Maximizing societal returns from fluvial landscapes while simultaneously ensuring resilience and aquatic biodiversity conservation is a formidable challenge for sustainable development
Significant advances have been made towards understanding the relationship between freshwater biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in the last decade, these studies have been largely restricted to simple species-poor assemblages in small-scale laboratory microcosms.[20,21,22,23,24,25]
Remarkable scientific progress has been achieved over the last decade increasing our understanding on the organisation of riverine biodiversity and processes across scales, including: (1) the role of river network structure and topology to explain habitat creation and maintenance through geomorphological processes,[29] (2) the importance of hierarchical patch dynamics on the biocomplexity of river ecosystems,[30] (3) the dependency of biodiversity on hydrological dynamics,[31] and (4) the role of spatial heterogeneity, connectivity, and asynchrony in riverine ecological dynamics.[32]
Summary
Ecosystem processes in riverine ecosystems may be resistant to local declines in species richness due to high levels of functional redundancy.[21] more recent evidence suggests that the focus on single processes, rather than a more realistic evaluation of the multiple processes that define ecosystem functioning, may have caused an overestimation of this apparent robustness.[25] Decades of biomonitoring research have shown that different species have different performance response curves across environmental gradients.[26] a greater level of biodiversity may be needed at larger scales to maintain functioning ecosystems This has important implications for scaling up (or down) findings from local to regional spatial scales, and may suggest ways to bridge the gap between biodiversity, ecosystem functioning and services.[27, 28] Biotic interactions are often the main determinant of ecosystem processes at local scales, whereas environmental drivers are usually assumed to have an increasingly important role at the river network scale and beyond (i.e., river basins that contain several streams of more than 1st order). This work provided the foundation for a basin level ecosystem valuation analysis for fisheries, floodplains and riparian zones.[41]
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