Navigating the Risks of Hydroclimatic Extremes for Aquatic Ecosystem Services in Forest Landscapes

REACTION employs an interdisciplinary integrated risk framework, combined with substantial data harmonization efforts and innovative data-driven modeling techniques to explore existing data resources, co-design relevant indicators and build models that allow us to simulate the complex interlinkages between statistically rare extreme events and freshwater ecosystem functioning and resulting services. This enables us to develop a risk model to provide spatially explicit insights into present-day hydroclimatic risks for ecosystem services provided by freshwater ecosystems in various European forest landscapes, and future risk under a business-as-usual scenario. Considering potential synergies and trade-offs with existing and projected human water uses, we co-develop management and restoration strategies with our stakeholders and test their effectiveness in reducing the vulnerability of freshwater ecosystem services and the risk from hydroclimatic extreme events.

Key outcomes of REACTION encompass (1) the cultivation of new knowledge on the effects of statistically rare and increasingly severe hydroclimatic extremes on ecosystem function and services, (2) the synthesis of complex risk information from various sources, combining local watershed data, remote sensing data, climate models, hydrological and hydraulic models to maximize the information content, and (3) the co-design of tools designed to share this knowledge/information to enhance stakeholder planning for risk management of freshwater ecosystem services in European forest landscapes.