Meet the MARS team: Anne Lyche Solheim
Anne taking samples from a Norwegian lake for the WISER project, 2009.
Anne Lyche Solheim is a senior researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA). Her specialisations include the ecological assessment of freshwaters for the Water Framework Directive, and the co-ordination and implementation of major European Union projects including WISER and REBECCA. We spoke to Anne about her work for the MARS project and her plans for future research.
1. What is your focus of your work in MARS?
As a leader of the MARS Work Package 8, communication and dissemination of results to stakeholders is my main focus.
However, I am also involved in the Work Package 3 experimental work in deep lake mesocosms to study the impacts of combined eutrophication and climate change pressures on the risk of harmful algal blooms in stratified lakes.
2. Why is your work important?
MARS is a policy support project, so it is vitally important that our results are effectively communicated and discussed with water managers at river basin level as well as national and European Union level.
The aim is to provide support for the 3rd river basin management plans required by the Water Framework Directive concerning how to find the best mix of mitigation and adaptation measures to counteract multiple pressures on European waters and ensure good status and provision of ecosystem services.
3. What are the key challenges for freshwater management in Europe?
The key challenges are to improve the poor ecological status presently occurring in the majority of European lakes and rivers, and also to implement the ecologically best measures to mitigate against and/or adapt to floods and droughts.
To meet these challenges the whole water catchment and all sectors using the water for food and energy production must be taken into account.
4. Tell us about a memorable experience in your career.
The two years I worked as a visiting scientist at JRC-Ispra in 2006-2007, contributing to the Water Framework Directive intercalibration of classification systems for ecological status assessment in lakes and also gaining better understanding of the impacts of climate change.
These years were an eye-opener on the importance of science-policy communication, and a door-opener to international water management related projects.
5. What inspired you to become a scientist?
A television programme on the negative impacts of water pollution in Norway’s largest river and downstream estuary.
6. What are your plans and ambitions for your future scientific work?
To do the MARS deep lake mesocosm experiments and find out whether climate change will cause harmful algal blooms to occur at lower nutrient levels than earlier.
Otherwise, to contribute to the European Freshwater Ecosystem Assessment and the EU Biodiversity strategy 2020 by assessing the potential for harmonisation of the Water Framework Directive and the Habitats Directive based on an analysis of their systems of typology and status assessments.
Finally, to influence the Water Framework Directive revision in 2018 using outputs from MARS and other projects and processes.
Tomorrow, March 22nd 2014, is the United Nations World Water Day, an annual event that focuses attention on the importance of freshwater environments. A 2012 UNICEF report estimates that at least 780 million people globally – approximately one in nine of the world’s population – do not have access to safe, clean drinking water.
This year, the theme of the day is energy. The World Water Development Report launched today, focuses on the relationships between water and energy production, outlining that hydroelectricity is the world’s largest source of renewable energy, and roughly 75% of all industrial water withdrawals from global freshwaters are used for hydroelectricity. These are key global issues, as David Malone, Rector of the United Nations University – the convenors of this year’s World Water Day – states: “Energy and water are at the top of the global development agenda … it is essential that we stimulate more debate and interactive dialogue around possible solutions to our energy and water challenges”.
Given that more than 1.3 billion people globally do not have access to electricity, one thread that World Water Day aims to discuss is the merits of using freshwater as an energy source. Hydroelectricity offers the potential of renewable, low-carbon energy production – advocated under the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism – but what are the effects of its development on freshwater environments?
Image credit: World Water Day 2014
Hydropower, fragmentation and ecological stress
From the perspective of the MARS project, we could see this debate as being about the different stresses that energy production places upon freshwater environments. A key stress on freshwaters by energy production is fragmentation from hydropower schemes.
Dams built for hydropower fragment rivers, altering the timing, quantity and quality of water flows, permanently flooding surrounding upstream areas and providing barriers to the movement of animals, sediment and nutrients (see this World Commission on Dams report from 2000). This process of fragmentation has the potential to significantly alter the ecological functioning and health of freshwater ecosystems, and reduce the services they provide to humans.
Hydropower and ecological, social and economic sustainability
Former director of the WWF Freshwater Program Jamie Pittock, whose current research examines the relationships between water and energy, suggests that this process of fragmentation is synergistic with another major freshwater stress – climate change. In a 2010 viewpoint article in Water Alternatives, Pittock suggests that as climate change continues to develop and impact on freshwaters – causing water scarcity in some areas, flooding in others – more hydropower schemes are built as low-carbon energy policy solutions, adding further stresses to freshwater environments already under threat.
According to a 2003 UN report, 60% of the world’s largest 227 rivers are severely fragmented by dams and other diversions. As Ute Collier of the WWF Freshwater Programme outlines in a 2004 paper ‘Hydropower and the Environment: Towards Better Decision Making’, a key question to answer is how the potential of sustainable, low-carbon energy production offered by hydroelectric schemes can be balanced with the negative ecological impacts of fragmenting freshwater ecosystems.
In addition, Collier notes that the negative effects of ecosystem fragmentation and degradation by hydroelectric schemes often disproportionately affect the poorest in society by displacing communities and reducing ecosystem service production, for example fish to eat and water to drink. Can we manage the energy, food and water needs of growing populations without compromising the health of our freshwater ecosystems?
Image credit: World Water Day 2014
Certification for sustainable hydropower schemes?
A potentially promising development is the foundation of the Hydropower Sustainability Assessment Forum in an effort to design a certification scheme to ensure certain environmental and social guidelines are met by new hydropower schemes. The Hydropower Sustainability Assessment Protocol was launched in 2011, to give a set of criteria against which hydroelectric schemes could be assessed for environmental, social, technical and economic sustainability.
Such certification schemes already successfully exist for sustainable wood (Forest Stewardship Council), palm oil (Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil) and fish (Marine Stewardship Council) markets. It will be interesting to see what effect the Hydropower Protocol has on future hydropower development, particularly in how ecosystem health can be conserved or restored as part of such schemes.
A wider to debate – lend your voice
World Water Day is a valuable event to prompt debate about these issues, and discuss them amongst a global community. This article has only highlighted one strand of a major, emerging debate over the interrelationships between energy and water. We’d encourage you to leave a comment below if you’ve any thoughts, ideas or questions on this or the wider debate.
MARS interview with Angus Webb, University of Melbourne
Christian Feld talked to project partner Angus Webb of the University of Melbourne in the leafy grounds of the hotel at the MARS kickoff meeting on Mallorca in February 2014.
Meet the MARS Team: Sebastian Birk
Sebastian presenting to the MARS kickoff meeting in Mallorca (photo: Christian Feld)
Today we begin the first in a series of ‘Meet the Team’ articles where we talk to the people involved in the MARS project to find out more about their work.
Sebastian Birk is a researcher at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany. He is a specialist in the ecological assessment of European freshwaters, and his work on the topic has contributed to the design and implementation of the Water Framework Directive.
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1. What is the focus of your work for MARS?
I am part of the MARS coordination team at the University of Duisburg-Essen, and I lead the scientific work package on defining the frameworks for understanding and studying multiple stressors. I am especially interested in tasks covering indicators of the effects that the multiple pressures have on our freshwater.
2. Why is your work important?
Recently I read a newspaper article about the growing public awareness regarding environmental issues. Despite this, however, there is no effective halting of biodiversity loss in our freshwaters, and salmon shoals do not yet return to German rivers.
This seems contradictory, but it is symptomatic of our modern-day society: walking the thin line between green consciousness and green-washing. I believe that MARS can provide a fundamental contribution to enhance sustainable management of our freshwaters for the benefits of humans and nature.
A silent cruise across the Dalälven, Sweden (photo: Sebastian Birk)
3. What are the key challenges for freshwater management in Europe?
In my opinion it is the diverging priorities of wider society, which does not value Europe’s ecosystem health highly. Environmental issues call for constant advocacy.
And here I think of our scientific commitment, for instance, to responsibly implement the idea of ecosystem services (one strand of research we are following in MARS). And beyond the ecological sphere, to think of how alternative socio-economic models such as the steady state economy (see this Herman Daly article on the subject) may allow us to frame a different agenda for Europe’s environments.
Muddy waters: the Garonne river near Bordeaux (photo: Sebastian Birk)
4. Tell us about a memorable experience in your career.
There are quite a few that I remember. Meeting with people, exchanging views and ideas, creating common ambitions and solutions, and building friendships across this beautiful European continent.
Canoeing the sea stretch of the Miño, searching for foggy ponds in Les Landes or cooling down from the Pannonian heat on the Danube bend are all memories to remember.
A Swedish spring: the perfect working environment (photo: Sebastian Birk)
5. What inspired you to become a scientist?
Let me answer with the quote by Nobel laureate Sir Peter Medawar:
“Scientists are people of very dissimilar temperaments doing different things in very different ways. Among scientists are collectors, classifiers and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics. What sort of mind or temperament can all these people be supposed to have in common? Obligative scientists must be very rare, and most people who are in fact scientists could easily have been something else instead.”
I guess doing science simply has the most of everything.
6. What are your plans and ambitions for your future scientific work?
On this ‘voyage’ to MARS I am focused on keeping my direction. Once landed, new horizons will appear that will certainly motivate me to face fresh challenges. I am already curious …
What we talk about when we talk about uncertainty
2014 has been the wettest UK winter since records began (photo: Creative Commons)
In recent weeks, the south of England – in particular the Somerset Levels and the Thames Valley – have been subject to the worst floods in living memory (see for example). Repeated weather systems moving in from the Atlantic Ocean have brought heavy, sustained rainfall, which have overwhelmed watercourses and flooded surrounding fields, roads, railways and houses.
Regardless of whether these unprecedented floods are directly caused by climate change (the Met Office have confirmed that this has been the wettest UK winter on record), they have caused two fascinating social effects. First, as freshwater breaks its usual bounds and becomes a risk to life and livelihood, a wider group of people become interested in how our water should be managed, and why. Second, we begin to encounter complex ideas of uncertainty in understanding the drivers and causes of such flooding events and their interaction: heavy, sustained rainfall; urbanisation on the flood plain; silted, hydrologically inefficient (but perhaps, biodiverse) river channels. What are the main drivers of these floods? How do they interact? And what measures should we prioritise for future management?
Scientific research could be described as an attempt to reduce our uncertainty about how the world works. However, the idea of uncertainty has the potential to be interpreted as a deficiency in research – ‘not knowing’ or ‘not being sure’ – particularly in debates over future trajectories of climate change. The word ‘uncertainty’ in daily language may carry negative connotations. However, scientists are used to working within margins of error – 95%, 99% – to make confident statements about the world (it could be argued that nothing in life is 100% certain).
Such uncertainties – however small – make it difficult to talk about science to the public and to policy makers: people are (understandably) uncomfortable with dealing with uncertainty when the outcomes may affect their livelihoods and work. Interestingly, a recent report on climate change suggests that the idea of ‘risk’ (as used by the insurance industry) may be more successful in communicating ideas of environmental uncertainty.
The idea of trust is important here too – particularly from the public – trust that scientists and policy makers are making appropriate decisions about the environment. Here, (potentially uncertain) scientific information doesn’t act in a vacuum, instead as part of a complex network of social, cultural and political values held by the public: the blame and responsibility for events such as UK flooding potentially influenced as much by personal experience and media representations of their impact as any direct scientific advice.
Moving beyond a simple (and mostly discredited) ‘deficit model’ of science communication, it seems more important than ever that research on such potentially catastrophic environmental events can engage people to best frame research outcomes (including the uncertainties) to help the public and policy makers understand and make decisions about environmental stressors and their impact on daily life.
Without directly working on the UK floods, the MARS project is designed to study such uncertainties in how freshwaters respond to stress. Environmental uncertainty is difficult to communicate, usually reduced to a set of possible scenarios over how the environment may react and alter to different stresses. In this project, we want to continue to the work of BioFresh to use this blog as a place to ‘get behind the scenes’ of MARS’ research to outline and discuss the issues, uncertainties and potential impacts of our work.
We see blogs as a great conduit through which to talk about these themes. Through a set of features on different stressors, different environments to be studied, interviews with our scientists and the potential implications of our work for water policy and environmental management, we will look to find ways to talk about uncertainty and risk in clear terms, and to encourage feedback and debate.
Some interesting links:
‘Making sense of uncertainty: why uncertainty is part of science’ Sense about Science (2013)
‘Handling uncertainty in science’, Professor Tim Palmer, The Royal Society ‘Science Sees Further’
‘Communicating risk in a soundbite, a guide for scientists’ Science Media Centre
Pidgeon N and Fischer B (2011) ‘The role of social and decision sciences in communicating uncertain climate risks’ Nature Climate Change 1: 35-41
Jacqueline McGlade introduces the UNEP Live vision
Last week’s Citizen cyberscience summit in London was a roller coster of inspiring ideas being put into action.
In the science and policy session, Jacqueline McGlade delivered this video presentation on the vision and concept of the UNEP Live platform, launched on 16 January 2014. This chimes with the vision of the BioFresh platform, which members of our community have created to make freshwater biodiversity information and data both accessible and open.
Introducing the MARS project: Part 2
Following last week’s Part 1 of the Introduction to MARS, we’ll now look at how the project aims to support and strengthen freshwater policy making across Europe.
Providing support for freshwater policy and management at three different scales
MARS aims to yield new and important results for water managers and environmental policy makers across Europe. In particular this work will contribute to strengthening the Water Framework Directive, the key piece of European legislation implemented in 2000 to protect and improve the quality of Europe’s freshwaters.
As this ten year review of the Water Framework Directive (2010) by MARS co-ordinator Daniel Hering and colleagues states, a key challenge for future water policy is to deal with the impact of emerging stressors caused by climatic and social change.
In particular, Hering and colleagues highlight the need for studies on the ability of freshwater ecosystems to absorb environmental stress (a process known as resilience). Similarly, the paper suggests new studies on the different trajectories that ecosystems may take in response to stress when restoration management is undertaken. However, at present the Water Framework Directive does not mention the impact of multiple stressors on freshwater ecosystems.
With this shortfall in mind, MARS has been designed to give useful outputs to support freshwater policy at three key scales: individual water bodies, river basins or catchments and the European continent.
Questions such as ‘what will be the consequences of greening Europe’s agriculture?’ and ‘how does climate change impact on the multiply stressed ecosystems?’ will be investigated at all scales, allowing water managers and policy makers to make decisions over mitigating stressors under a number of different future scenarios.
Experiments at the water body scale
At the smallest scale, experiments will be carried out to simulate multiple stressors and measure the response of an ecosystem. In lakes, these experiments can be carried out using mesocosms, which provide a small body of water that can be closely controlled and monitored when different stressors are simulated. In rivers, experiments can be carried out along artificial channels, where variables such as flow volume, flow speed and water temperature can be controlled. In both sets of experiments, the impact of simulated stressors such as extreme rain or water scarcity can be observed.
Computer modelling at the river basin scale
At the river basin or catchment scale, computer models will be run to simulate the impact of stressors such as climate change or land use change (especially relating to flow alterations and water scarcity ) on variables such as water nutrient levels and temperature . These results will then be linked to the results on ecosystem functioning at the smaller, experimental scale. MARS will study 16 river basins across Europe, including the Thames, Ruhr, Elbe and Lower Danube.
Bringing together data at the European scale
At the largest, European scale, MARS will use data gathered from projects such as WISER in the establishment and monitoring of the Water Framework Directive to study and establish large-scale relationships between freshwater biodiversity, ecosystem functioning and ecosystem services to humans.
MARS: providing new information on complex freshwater environments to aid their conservation and restoration
These are complicated issues to which there are no simple answers. MARS aims to provide new information on how multiple stressors impact freshwater ecosystems in an increasingly complex and uncertain world faced with climatic, environmental and social change.
This information will be provided at the three scales useful to water body and river basin managers and European policy makers through a range of tools and wiki information system. It is intended that the project will help foster collaboration to promote freshwater ecosystem conservation and restoration at a range of scales, from individual rivers and lakes up to the European continent.
Over the coming weeks, we’ll transition the blog from BioFresh to MARS over a series of posts linking the two projects, giving more detailed information about many of the points raised in these two posts, and looking to the future.
The first MARS meeting in Mallorca
MARS partners at the Mallorca meeting
This week, the MARS project hosted its first meeting on the Spanish island of Mallorca, bringing together 100 scientists from 24 partner institutions in 17 countries.
Over the course of four days (17 – 21 February), the cross-disciplinary team – including aquatic ecologists, hydrologists, chemists, economists, engineers and software developers – came together to discuss and plan MARS’ work for the next four years.
The meeting will help shape and design the tools for future water management that the project will produce.
We’ll report back on the meeting over the next few weeks.
Project leader Daniel Hering presenting to the Mallorca meeting
Introducing the MARS project: Part 1
Over the coming weeks, the BioFresh blog will be changing. As the BioFresh project draws to a close with the ‘Water Lives’ symposium in Brussels, the blog will transition to the new MARS project.
The content will still focus on issues relating to freshwater ecosystem science, conservation and policy, but will be run by MARS, and it will feature news and information on the project’s development from February 2014.
Above is a video explaining the background of MARS, featuring project co-ordinators Daniel Hering and Christian Feld at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, both of whom worked on the BioFresh project.
What is MARS?
MARS (Managing Aquatic Ecosystems And Water Resources Under Multiple Stressors) is a new collaborative European Union Seventh Framework project which aims to identify and understand how different stressors – for example pollution, water abstraction, and habitat fragmentation – impact freshwater environments, both now and in the future.
What are stressors?
Stressors are biological (biotic, e.g. pollution) or non-biological (abiotic e.g. water abstraction) processes that have negative impacts on organisms and communities in an ecosystem. These can be naturally occurring (e.g. flooding) or man-made (e.g. habitat fragmentation).
European freshwaters are subject to a complex set of stressors resulting from human activity. As MARS partner Steve Ormerod and his colleagues outlined in a 2010 article in Freshwater Biology (‘Multiple Stressors in Freshwater Ecosystems’) human impacts on freshwater ecosystems typically alter more than one environmental stressor.
For example, urbanisation might affect the water quantity and pollution content of runoff into a river; increase the risk of flooding; reduce the amount of habitat available for different organisms; and increase the ability of invasive species (such as Chinese mitten crabs) to disperse.
Freshwaters – lakes, rivers, estuaries and groundwater – can be polluted, abstracted, altered and fragmented by human activity, often with unpredictable results for ecosystem health and function. In particular, the interaction of multiple stressors is poorly understood and documented.
In a 2010 paper ‘Multiple stressors in coupled river-floodplain ecosystems’, BioFresh leader Klement Tockner states ‘Predicting and understanding the effects of multiple stressors is one of the most important challenges presently facing ecological studies.’
Interactions of multiple stressors
In some cases stressors may cancel each other out (or act ‘antagonistically’). For example, a 1996 study by Helmut Klapper and colleagues suggests that organic pollution and eutrophication may neutralise acidification from open cast mining in German lake ecosystems.
On the other hand, stressors may interact to worsen their individual effects (in the MARS project, this is termed as the stressors acting ‘synergistically’.) For example, a 2011 study by Anika Wagenhoff and colleagues suggests that the build up of sediment pollution and nutrients can co-determine the diversity and health of invertebrate and algae communities in New Zealand streams.
Stressors, ecosystem function and ecosystem services
Stressors often negatively impact the organisms living in freshwaters – plants, fish, insects and microorganisms – directly. These negative impacts on organisms may then affect the functioning of the ecosystem, for example the natural purification of watercourses by photosynthesising plants. In turn, this change in ecosystem function may alter the provision of ecosystem services to humans, affecting services such as drinking water supply or fish availability for food.
For more information on these interrelations, this 2010 chapter by Rob Haines-Young and Marion Potschin at Nottingham University provides a good introduction
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In short, the MARS project is looking to untangle how different stressors interact and impact the biodiversity, function and ecosystem service provision of European freshwaters. This work will support stronger freshwater conservation and restoration initiatives at the water body, catchment and continental scale, in the context of ongoing climatic and social change.
Part two of this Introduction to MARS will explain how the project will study the impact of multiple stressors on freshwater environments at a variety of scales in order to inform and support European freshwater policy.
You can access the MARS website here: http://mars-project.eu/
For more information: there is an open-access set of journal articles related to the themes of MARS available online from a special issue of Freshwater Biology, published in January 2010.
Water Lives Symposium: successful science-policy dialoguing
Last week’s Water Lives symposium in Brussels was deemed a great sucess by all involved. The wonderful museum of the Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences offered a setting that took participants out of their everyday work environment and created the space to discuss issues of mutual interest and concern. Among these were the value of riparian corridors for maintianing biodiveristy in a changing climate, the importance of south-eastern Europe for freshwater biodiversity conservation (highlighted in new maps presented of EU freshwater biodiveristy), and the politics and scientific unease surrounding the ecosystems services concept.
The key themes and messages of the symposium are still being consilidated and prepared. A short video sumamry and longer podcast will be released soon and the video-streaming of first day’s sessions will be made avialble. In the meantime here are some photos which capture something of the essence and spirit of the symposium.
Photo: Ria Mishaal
Photo: Ria Mishaal
- Photo: Ria Mishaal
Photo: Ria Mishaal
Photo: Ria Mishaal
The Freshwater Blog 