Our research
Freshwater is essential to life on Earth, providing irreplaceable ecosystem services including drinking water, power and transport, food and irrigation, and flood control, as well as recreational and cultural values.
Although freshwater ecosystems make up only 0.01% of all the water on Earth, they are disproportionally rich in plant and animal diversity and are among the most imperiled. Two important anthropogenic stressors with negative impacts on biodiversity are habitat destruction and loss of connectivity. These anthropogenic stressors are expected to be exacerbated by ongoing global warming.
Because aquatic and terrestrial systems are tightly coupled, it is now widely recognized that sustainable management of freshwaters must be accomplished at the watershed scale, as manifested by the EU Water Framework Directive. Conservation plans should apply sound ecological knowledge to help meet societal needs while conserving biodiversity and ecosystem services.
NRRV:s research is described (below and to the right) as roughly split into three thematic areas: River connectivity, Aquatic-Terrestrial Habitats and Linkages and Winter ecology in a changing world. A large part of our research fits into one of these thematic areas while other research conducted at RivEM takes place horizontally between thematic areas or even wider in the overarching field of River Ecology and Management.