Forecasting and early warning systems are important investments to protect lives, properties, and livelihood. While early warning systems are frequently used to predict the magnitude, location, and timing of potentially damaging events, these systems rarely provide impact estimates, such as the expected amount and distribution of physical damage, human consequences, disruption of services, or financial loss. Complementing early warning systems with impact forecasts has a twofold advantage: It would provide decision makers with richer information to take informed decisions about emergency measures and focus the attention of different disciplines on a common target. This would allow capitalizing on synergies between different disciplines and boosting the development of multihazard early warning systems. This review discusses the state of the art in impact forecasting for a wide range of natural hazards. We outline the added value of impact-based warnings compared to hazard forecasting for the emergency phase, indicate challenges and pitfalls, and synthesize the review results across hazard types most relevant for Europe. Plain Language Summary Forecasting and early warning systems are important investments to protect lives, properties and livelihood. While such systems are frequently used to predict the magnitude, location, and timing of potentially damaging events, they rarely provide impact estimates, such as the expected physical damage, human consequences, disruption of services, or financial loss. Extending hazard forecast systems to include impact estimates promises many benefits for the emergency phase, for instance, for organizing evacuations. We review and compare the state of the art of impact forecasting across a wide range of natural hazards and outline opportunities and key challenges for research and development of impact forecasting.
Many rivers and wetlands in south-western Australia are threatened by salinisation due to rising saline watertables, which have resulted from land clearing and the replacement of deep-rooted perennial species with shallow-rooted annual species. A four to six weekly sampling program of water quality, submerged macrophytes and macroinvertebrates was undertaken at six wetlands, from September 2002 to February 2004, to investigate seasonal variation in a range of primary and secondary saline systems. The wetlands dried and filled at different times in response to local rainfall patterns, and salinities varied accordingly with evapoconcentration and dilution. Two types of clear-water wetlands were recognised; those dominated by submerged aquatic macrophytes (Ruppia, Lepilaena and Lamprothamnium) and those dominated by benthic microbial communities. Two types of turbid wetlands were also recognised; those with high concentrations of phytoplankton and those with high concentrations of suspended sediments. A primary saline lake and two lakes that have only recently been affected by secondary salinisation persisted in a clear, macrophytedominated regime throughout most of the study period, except during drying and filling. Two lakes with a long history of secondary salinisation (70 years) moved between regimes over the study period. A clear, benthic microbial community -dominated regime only persisted at the wetland which contained permanent water throughout the study period. The turbid regimes were only present during drying and refilling phases. A richer and more abundant macroinvertebrate fauna was associated with the clear, macrophytedominated wetlands. Our results suggest that the development of management guidelines that recognise the presence of different ecological regimes and that consider the interactions between water regime, salinity, and primary and secondary production will be more useful in protecting biodiversity and ecological function in these systems than managing salinity as a single factor.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.