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Current projects |
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RECHARGE. REstoring CatcHments And Rivers under Global change RECHARGE is a European research project funded under the Water4All Partnership that investigates how Nature-based Solutions (NbS) can enhance the resilience of freshwater ecosystems and the benefits they provide to society. The project brings together research teams from Belgium, Poland, Portugal and Spain to assess the ecological functioning of different freshwater restoration strategies across contrasting environmental contexts. Rather than focusing solely on changes in habitat or biodiversity, RECHARGE also examines whether NbS can restore key ecosystem processes and functions, such as nutrient retention, organic matter decomposition and the connectivity between aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. Our research group leads the Spanish case study in the lower Arga River (Navarre), where previous restoration actions have reconnected former river meanders, restored floodplain habitats and created a more diverse mosaic of aquatic and terrestrial environments. We compare the main river channel with reconnected meanders, floodplain ponds and riparian soils to evaluate how these restored habitats contribute to ecosystem functioning under different hydrological and seasonal conditions. Our work combines measurements of nutrient uptake, organic matter decomposition, macroinvertebrate communities, aquatic and riparian vegetation, stable isotopes and environmental conditions. By integrating structural and functional indicators, RECHARGE aims to understand not only whether restored ecosystems look more natural, but also whether they recover the ecological processes that sustain healthy and resilient river landscapes. Ultimately, the project will provide scientific evidence to improve the design, assessment and implementation of NbS for freshwater restoration and climate adaptation across Europe.
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ODUM. Operationalizing Drivers and Unveiling trajectories in river Metabolism River ecosystems are biodiversity hotspots that process large amounts of organic matter and inorganic nutrients and exchange greenhouse gases with the atmosphere. Many of these processes are tightly linked to river ecosystem metabolism, which integrates the activity of organisms living in river channels, determines the energy available to aquatic food webs, and has important consequences for nutrient cycling, oxygen dynamics, greenhouse gas emissions and ecosystem health. ODUM focuses on improving our understanding of the patterns, drivers and long-term dynamics of river ecosystem metabolism. The project combines analyses of existing long-term monitoring datasets, observational field studies, manipulative experiments in artificial stream channels, the development of low-cost CO2 sensors, and modelling approaches. The project addresses four main questions: 1. How does river ecosystem metabolism respond to light, and how common are light saturation, photoinhibition and hysteresis across rivers and through time? 2. Which factors control resistance, resilience and recovery after flood disturbance, and how do streambed characteristics and resource availability influence these responses? 3. How has river ecosystem metabolism changed over recent decades in response to global environmental change, and what are the main drivers of these trends? 4. How variable are river CO2 emissions in space and time, and what is the contribution of river metabolism to those emissions? Overall, ODUM aims to reduce current uncertainties in the estimation and interpretation of river ecosystem metabolism and its contribution to carbon fluxes. By combining long-term data, experiments and new sensor technology, the project seeks to improve our understanding of past changes in river functioning and our capacity to anticipate future responses to climate change and other human pressures. The development and implementation of inexpensive CO2 sensors in water-quality monitoring networks may also help expand long-term observations of metabolism and greenhouse gas emissions across river systems.
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FRESHTRESS: Comprehensive assessment of multi-stressor impacts on freshwater ecosystems and organisms Freshtress aims to provide a comprehensive framework that allows assessing the joint ecological impacts of major stressors affecting freshwater ecosystems and organisms. There is an urgent need for advancing our knowledge on how human-induced environmental and biological changes such as climate change, pollution or biodiversity loss, are altering natural ecosystems and biological communities. Even if these issues have received considerable scientific attention in the last few decades, there are still important knowledge gaps that preclude a comprehensive understanding of how ecosystems and organisms are affected by the many stressors that often occur simultaneously. These deficiencies could be partly explained by (1) the difficulty of finding sufficient replication to study interactions among multiple stressors in nature, and (2) the complexity of experimental studies where several factors are manipulated at the same time and multiple variables are measured. In Freshtress, we address these issues through the use of mesocosm experiments that partly reproduce the complexity of natural systems while allowing the concomitant manipulation of several stressors and the measurement of multiple responses at different levels of biological complexity, from ecosystem functioning to organism physiology. |
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LandComp: The interactions between land use, substrate quality and consumers on global patterns of leaf litter decomposition in stream ecosystems The primary cause of biodiversity decline worldwide is habitat degradation. Given the tight relationship between biodiversity and various ecosystem processes, it is reasonable to predict that habitat degradation should also lead to changes in ecosystem functioning. However, this has not been explored on a large scale. An important ecosystem process in stream ecosystems is the processing of terrestrially-derived leaf litter from stream side vegetation. Breakdown of this material is largely a function of its chemistry (nutrients, secondary/structural compounds), macro- and micro-consumers, and environmental conditions. In stream ecosystems, changes in watershed land use from forest to agriculture, urban and plantation results in habitat changes in the stream environment. This is due to various factors. Changes in sediment mobility on the landscape due to agricultural activity leads to shifts in substrate distribution, which is important to species composition of invertebrate communities known to be important to regulating the processing of leaf litter. Impervious cover that characterizes urban landscapes disrupts the dynamic equilibrium of sediment flux, exporting more than that imported, driving river channels down and, as in agricultural streams, shifting substrate distribution. In addition, flow dynamics are altered, resulting in much more intense, shorter duration disturbance events than that experienced by forested streams. Furthermore, thermal regimes are altered in summer months as warm water is heated dramatically from impervious surfaces before exported to the stream environment. This has implications not only for the tolerances of invertebrate taxa, but also microbial decomposers as well. Taken together, it is expected that upstream land use should drive shifts in the processing of leaf litter decomposition, owing mainly to: 1. Altered flow regimes As such, we seek to answer the following questions: 1. Does leaf litter breakdown shift with land use — agriculture, urban, plantation, forest — systematically across the globe? Our approach is a large scale, distributed study embracing a network of more than 50 collaborators across the globe. Leaf litter breakdown of the same leaf species plus a local dominant species will be estimated in streams experiencing the impacts of four land use types: urban, agriculture, plantation (if available), and forest. Breakdown of leaf litter with and without access by leaf shredding invertebrates will be estimated, as will characterization of the local shredder communities. Results will be placed in the context of consistently measured environmental conditions (water physical, chemical conditions) and biome. |
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GLoBE Network GLoBE is an international network of freshwater ecologists, which main aim is to explore ecological patterns and processes in stream ecosystems at the global scale. Originally designed to specifically study one key stream ecosystem process, leaf litter breakdown (hence its name, which stands for 'Global Lotic Breakdown Experiments'), it has now expanded in order to consider a wide variety of ecological issues that are globally relevant. The network currently counts with collaborators from approximately 50 research teams from >30 countries across 6 continents. |
