Holistic evaluation and restoration measures of human impacts on freshwater ecosystems across biogeographical gradients

Ecosystems face threats from multiple, and often interacting, stressors at various spatial and temporal scales. Efforts to conserve and restore ecosystems hinge on understanding the processes behind the impacts on biodiversity dimensions that ultimately serve as targets for mitigation measures. Concurrently, inferences of cost-effectiveness and relevance of mitigation and restoration efforts demand knowledge of ecosystem structure and functioning at various levels of biological organization. Addressing the combinations of all relevant drivers at different spatial and temporal scales is for most systems a daunting task. Functional understanding is therefore essential for successful implementation of environmental protection policies and measures that needs to be applied at various spatial scales spanning from local to European as proposed in this project (FreshRestore as acronym). Functional knowledge on the accumulative effect of interactive stressors are particularly important in freshwaters due to their dendritic nature and interdependence between freshwaters and the surrounding terrestrial landscape.

FreshRestore is composed by an international and multidisciplinary consortium focused on lake ecosystems that are vital for societal prosperity and public health due to numerous ecosystem services like drinking water, biological filtering, fish production and recreational opportunities. FreshRestore will use existing data, methods and competence from Fennoscandian lakes, comprising one of the largest remaining pristine freshwater sources in the boreal and Arctic regions, to produce novel mechanistic understanding of how local anthropogenic stressors and climate interactions affect biodiversity and functioning of freshwater ecosystems. The results will be well-suited to scale up to a European scale, as well as to a global scale, to address effects of freshwater biodiversity loss and possible conservation and restoration efforts. Moreover, the project will produce empirical data which are urgently needed for parametrization and development of simulation models used for predicting community-level responses to environmental changes and human stressors (e.g. climate change, overfishing and invasive species). In this project, we aim to apply and generalise the methods developed on large Fennoscandian datasets to other European countries. We will address this specifically by testing and generalising the models in freshwater systems of southern Europe (Spain), where we will increase the current knowledge base on functional diversity with new field-collected data combined with already published data. An important aspect of the project is thus to transfer models and approaches, developed by the different partners, to new application contexts in the other countries. The project will facilitate sharing of knowledge and expertise between data-rich (Fennoscandia) and data-poor (Southern Europe) areas and thus provide a fruitful stepping stone for future projects focusing on fish populations and lake food webs and facilitating European freshwater restoration and conservation efforts. FreshRestore aims to increase the understanding of the intersection between human impact, freshwater biodiversity, and social and economic benefits and costs (i.e. developing Nature-Based Solutions and integrative socio-ecological approaches).