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 largescale 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 socioeconomic 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 socioeconomic concerns, the inclusion of multidisciplinary knowledge and data addressing the ecosystem scale independent of administrative or political boundaries. This approach has been developed in the H2020 project AQUACROSS.

Forest managers’ perspectives on environmental changes in the biosphere reserve Mura-Drava-Danube

“…To maintain the ecosystem services provided by riparian forests, sustainable forest management concepts will thus need to be adapted to these challenges by increasing the resilience of forest ecosystems (Funk et al, 2020;Riis et al, 2020;Rist and Moen, 2013). However, uncertainty about local changes and their magnitude is high and experiences in large-scale adaption measures are still scarce.…”

Semi-natural habitats in the European boreal region: Caught in the socio-ecological extinction vortex?

“…Unlike natural ecosystems, species and communities of semi-natural habitats are therefore directly under the influence of both natural processes and human management, and are thus shaped by socio-economic drivers. The failure to halt the decline may result from an inherently complex character of a socio-ecological system (Fischer et al 2017 ), and challenges in communicating this complexity across disciplines and among stakeholders (Raatikainen 2018 ; Funk et al 2020 ). Although many recent studies (e.g., Wehn et al 2018 ; Lomba et al 2019 ; Veidemane et al 2019 ) have shed light on interactions of drivers in the context of semi-natural habitat management, we still lack a simple yet informative framework to guide research on the semi-natural habitats as complex socio-ecological systems.…”