Ecosystem-Based Management to Support Conservation and Restoration Efforts in the Danube Basin

Abstract

Biodiversity and environmental integrity of river systems in the Danube catchment is threatened by multiple human alterations such as channelization, fragmentation or the disconnection of floodplains. Multiple human activities, including the construction of hydropower plants, expansion of agricultural use, and large-scale river regulation measures related to navigation and flood protection, are resulting in an ongoing loss of habitat, biodiversity and ecosystem service provision. Conservation and restoration of the systems biodiversity and ecosystem service provisioning is a key task for management but is challenging because the diversity of human activities and policy targets, scarcity of data compared to the complexity of the systems, heterogeneity of environmental problems and strong differences in socio-economic conditions along the Danube River hampers coordinated planning at the scale of the whole river basin and along the whole river from source to mouth. We evaluated three different implementations of an Ecosystem-Based Management (EBM) approach, which aims to support management efforts. This was done following the principles for EBM related to the resilience of ecosystems, the consideration of ecological and socio-economic concerns, the inclusion of multi-disciplinary knowledge and data addressing the ecosystem scale independent of administrative or political boundaries. This approach has been developed in the H2020 project AQUACROSS.