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Sustainable Places Research Institute

Freshwater landscapes

Freshwater ecosystems (rivers, lakes, ponds, groundwaters and wetlands) and their catchment landscapes provide major services.

For example, in the UK, 389,000 km of rivers transport water, matter, energy and organisms between air, land and sea. With the value of the UK's water estimated at £200 billion p.a. (Water UK), these are arguably our most important natural assets.

When managed appropriately, Freshwater landscapes should provide water for human or animal use, food, recreation and energy; regulate flooding, sediment flux, biogeochemical cycles, water quality and waste disposal; support adjacent ecosystems by supplying water, energy and nutrients; and provide cultural value via recreation, tourism and education. However, despite the benefits they deliver, freshwater landscapes have been fragmented and disconnected, extensively impacted by engineering, including flood embankments and channel modifications, and degraded through pollution and drainage.

At Cardiff University, a world class group of researchers affiliated to the Research Institute are currently working together to investigate how freshwater landscapes can be managed to deliver services on which we depend, while also preserving our natural resources. At spatial scales ranging from small experimental catchments to whole regions, and at temporal scales from sub-annual to over three decades, these researchers ask key questions about the sustainability of freshwater resources and landscapes. Current funded projects include:

  • Research for the National Ecosystem Assessment report 2011 by Steve Ormerod (Coordinating Author of the Freshwater Chapter), Isabelle Durance (lead author for the Freshwater and Wales Synthesis Chapter) and Ian Vaughan showed, for example, that while the maps of the trends in river quality indicate a progressive improvement since the 1980's (see Figure 1), rivers are still under pressure: rivers in urban or intensively farmed areas have significantly lower sanitary quality and elevated nutrients (e.g. nitrate greater than 5 milligrams per litre) than elsewhere, some upland regions are still affected by diffuse agricultural pollutants, there are still nitrate and phosphorus pollution issues and biological recovery is lagging behind chemical recovery. As land use and climate changes are likely to add further pressure to these landscapes, sustainable freshwater management will depend on more than an improved inventory and assessment. This work will be developed in the NEA second phase.
  • Research for the Countryside Council for Wales on the Landscape Connectivity of Freshwater Ecosystems: Strategic Review and Recommendations in 2011 by Ormerod, S. J., Durance, I., Hatton-Ellis T.W., Cable J., Chadwick E.A., Griffiths S., Jones T. H, Larsen S., Merrix F.L., Symondson W.O.C., Thomas R.J & Vaughan I.P. As freshwaters have been under-represented in the recent connectivity debate, we proposed in this report a more holistic definition of freshwater connectivity as: "The favourable, water-mediated transfer of matter, energy and/or organisms within or between units of the hydrological cycle, along with functional landscape-scale linkages among freshwater habitats, species and communities". While the role of connectivity in the movement of freshwater organisms is challenging, our report illustrated the importance of connectivity to internal freshwater processes such as energy flow through food webs, parasite-host interactions, the microbial loop, freshwater ecosystem energetics, sediment dynamics, pollutant flux, and nutrients. It also underlined the need to:
    • develop suitable tools and techniques for organisms and other key fluxes and functions
    • investigate how landscape ecological methods can reveal connectivity problems based on the distribution of genes, species and habitats of varying quality
    • understand better the movement of priority freshwater organisms, as well as factors affecting permeability, colonisation and invisibility
  • Ongoing postdoctoral on a range of subjects involving freshwater landscapes are also in progress in this very active group. Most of these doctoral projects are interdisciplinary and stem from the collaboration of different schools within the Research Institute, namely the Schools of Biosciences, Earth and Environmental Sciences and Psychology.

Researchers

  • Stephen Thomas – Adapting rivers to climate change to support high value fish and fisheries (EU KESS studentship)
  • Matthew Dray – Consequences of increasing atmospheric CO2 on litter quality and freshwater processing (Cardiff University, President studentships)
  • Kate Walker – Public perception of habitat management plans for the freshwater pearl mussel in response to environmental change (ESRC/NERC)
  • Rebecca Marsh – Climate change and dynamic sediment controls on stream organisms (Cardiff University, President studentships)
  • Paul Sinadurai – Factors affecting the ecology of Carabidae and Coleoptera in a modified riverine environments (Brecon Beacons Authority)