Protecting and restoring habitats to benefit freshwater biodiversity

Abstract

Freshwater biodiversity is under great threat across the globe as evidenced by more severe declines relative to other types of ecosystems. One of the main stressors responsible for these concerning trends is habitat fragmentation, degradation, and loss stemming from anthropogenic activities including energy production, urbanization, agriculture, and resource extraction. Habitat protection and restoration both play an integral role in efforts to save freshwater biodiversity and associated ecosystem services from further decline. In this paper, we summarize the sources of threats associated with habitat fragmentation, degradation, and loss, and then outline response options to protect and restore freshwater habitats. Specific response options are to: legislate the protection of healthy and productive freshwater ecosystems; prioritize habitats for protection and restoration; enact durable protections; conserve habitat in a coordinated and integrated manner; engage in evidence-based restoration using an adaptive management approach; ensure that potential freshwater habitat alterations are mitigated or off-set; and future-proof protection and restoration actions. Such work should be done through a lens that engages and involves local community members. We identify three broad categories of obstacles that arise during the implementation of the response options outlined: a) scientific (e.g., inaccessible data or uncertainties), b) institutional and management (e.g., capacity issues or differing goals across agencies), and c) social and political (e.g., prioritizing economic development over conservation initiatives). The protection and restoration of habitats is key to bending the curve for freshwater biodiversity, with a comprehensive, connected, and coordinated effort of response options needed to protect intact habitats and restore fragmented, degraded, and lost habitats and the biodiversity and ecosystem services that they support.

Reviving Europe's rivers: Seven challenges in the implementation of the Nature Restoration Law to restore free‐flowing rivers

“…Finally, both present and future global change will put additional strains on rivers, including warming, intermittency, and the facilitation of the spread of invasive or harmful species. In this context, methodical and widespread protection efforts (Hermoso et al, 2016;Watson et al, 2014), together with large-scale restoration actions, are urgently needed to combat the freshwater biodiversity crisis (Maasri et al, 2022;Piczak et al, 2023).…”

Water Reserves for the Environment: A Strategic and Temporal Analysis (2012–2022) for the Implementation of Environmental Flows in Mexico

“…The implementation of environmental flows is a top priority step in global action and emergency plans to reverse or at least halt the degradation of these ecosystems [2,3]. Therefore, legal protection for free-flowing rivers, that is to say, free of infrastructure that alters the flow and flood regime, is a crucial move [8,9,17,53,56,57].…”

“…The experience gained in the allocation of water for the environment over the last decade is revealing for its scope and is acknowledged in scientific literature [3,9,16,56,57,63,64]. The results have the potential to be leveraged through public policy for water resources management, conservation, and addressing climate change.…”

“…Such country-scale strategic environmental water implementation is aligned to the state-of-the-art calls for protecting and restoring habitats to mitigate the ongoing loss of freshwater biodiversity [2,3,56,57]. It builds on the commitment made by the government of Mexico, together with those from Colombia, Congo, Ecuador, Gabon, and Zambia at the United Nations (UN) 2023 Water Conference for the Freshwater Challenge (https://www.gob.mx/sre/prensa/mexico-joins-the-freshwater-challenge-to-restore-riversand-wetlands-and-address-water-scarcity?idiom=en) that aims to collectively restore 300,000 km of rivers and 350 million hectares of wetlands and address water scarcity.…”

How to barcode (almost all) freshwater biodiversity

“…These perturbations can markedly disrupt ecological structure and function (Angeler et al 2014; Dudgeon et al 2006), so questions pertaining to biodiversity conservation and stewardship of aquatic ecosystems necessarily involve quantification of interactions among species (e.g. effect of invasive species on native communities, altered trophic complexity and trophic cascades; Higgins and Zanden 2010; Karatayev and Burlakova 2022; Piczak et al 2023). It is crucial that we develop, validate and standardize monitoring tools that allows rapid and comprehensive assessment of freshwater communities to better characterize community composition and change in responses to perturbations to inform conservation (Ficetola and Taberlet 2022).…”