Key messages
A lot of questions frequently arise in the daily business of river basin and water management. The answers are not trivial and have been subject to the large-scale integrated project WISER.
This section summerizes clearly key messages, evidences, implications and further information in a step-by-step overview for different water categories.
Lake management
- Impacts of climate warming on lake fish assemblages: evidence from 24 European long-term data series
- Include zooplankton as a BQE in assessment of lake ecological status, please
- The Lake Load Response model (LLR) helps water managers estimate the required reduction in nutrient load under a variety of climatic conditions
- Models can guide lake restoration if following good modelling practise — results from two case studies
- Impacts of climate change and restoration on ecological status class: a management-oriented modelling approach
- Using lake sediments to define reference conditions and inform lake management
River management
- Riverine assemblages respond differently to individual stressors and stress levels
- Environmental stressors act hierarchically
- Catchment and riparian land use control local habitat conditions
- Restoration is more likely to be successful, if upstream physical habitat degradation and land use impacts are low Local restoration is often unsuccessful
- River Basin Management Plans insufficiently account for research and monitoring demands
Transitional and coastal water assessment
- Benthic invertebrates respond consistently to human pressure gradients across transitional and coastal waters
- Setting adequate reference conditions in assessing benthic quality is one of the most important tasks
- Species traits are useful and reliable for the assessment of transitional water ecosystems
- Defining type-specific reference conditions for benthic macroinvertebrates in Mediterranean lagoons is not trivial, but required to minimize misclassification
- Defining ecological potential in transitional waters is challenging
Transitional and costal water management
- Benthic communities become more vulnerable to hypoxia with warming
- Hydrogen sulphide exacerbates effects of hypoxia
- Phytoplankton biomass yield relative to nutrients have doubled
- Hypoxia makes ecosystem recovery more difficult
- Recovery of estuarine and coastal ecosystems takes decades
- Loss of benthic vegetation sustains a turbid regime
As a first step we present key messages for lake management, for river management, for transitional and coastal water assessment and for transitional and coastal water management, more will come within the next months and the end of the project in spring 2012.