Tailoring a functional approach for identifying and mapping ecosystem services in running waters: Towards a national assessment

Practical approaches for assessment and mapping of ecosystem services (ES), a requirement for all EU member states, have been developed for terrestrial habitats but remain in their infancy for freshwaters.

This hinders policy and management of the multiple ES provided by running waters, which include key provisioning (e.g. potable water, fish) and regulating (e.g. water purification, nutrient retention) services.

Development of a framework for mapping provisioning and regulating ES in streams requires an improved understanding of how biodiversity, ecosystem functioning and ES are related.

The functional traits of species - phenotypic features regulating the impacts of organisms on ecosystem functioning - provide a useful link between variation in community composition recorded by monitoring schemes and outcomes for ES.

The present project offers a multidisciplinary approach to tackling ES mapping in streams, by transferring a functional trait-ES framework developed for terrestrial habitats, accounting both for connectivity in hydrological networks and spatiotemporal variation in communities.

I will first identify provisioning and regulating stream services and their underpinning ecosystem properties, then model these properties from functional traits and environmental variables using field data, and use these models to predict ES.

Finally, I will map demands for and potential supply of ES by running waters at the Swedish national scale in order to support decision makers.