Main messages from BIOWATER Annual Camp (October 2019)
BIOWATER is now two years’ old, and we have three more years as a Centre of Excellence. At the Annual BIOWATER Camp 2019 we discussed our Centre’s achievements so far, but we did not rest on our laurels too long: Rather, we spent the time to develop our plans and priorities for the next years.
We met in Rokuanhovi, near the Rokua National Park, and among the protected trees, peatlands and lakes in the middle of Finland, we laid the foundations for the three upcoming years of BIOWATER.
PhDs and post docs had prepared posters of their work, and the interest was huge.
The future is young and bright!
BIOWATER is carrying out a large proportion of the research through the work of PhD-students and post-docs. These young people are working on a wide variety of scientific questions, all of which are oriented towards the effects of the green shift on landscapes, waters and humans.
It was exciting to see the progress done since our 2018 BIOWATER Annual Camp, and to hear about their projects and plans. See our dedicated PhD/Post-doc-page https://biowater.info/phd-students/ for more info on their work; here is just a random selection of some questions raised in their studies:
- What can long term monitoring data tell us about the interactions of land use, climate, and water quality across the Nordic landscapes?
- Can we learn from long-term data series how the growing season is changing, and how this affects the farmers’ behaviors, or influences the losses of nutrients?
- To which degree can a relatively simple environmental measure, such as allowing trees to grow along the streams, improve biodiversity and water quality?
- How can constructed wetlands, bioreactors and integrated buffer zones better reduce nutrient exports from tile drained fields?
- How can we avoid that mitigation measures have negative side-effects, such as unwanted leaching of dissolved phosphorus and/or emission of Green House Gases?
- Can we model catchments that are intensely modified by drainage networks?
- What ecosystem services to humans may be lost if the water quality deteriorates?
- How will the changes in our catchments interact, and affect their appearance and suitability for recreation and tourism?
- Can we construct a Nordic typology for mini-catchment that can be used when predicting future bioeconomy impacts on water quality?
To be sure, this is just a selection, but the more ancient participants at the BIOWATER meeting were thoroughly impressed by the progress made and the sincerity and professionalism of our students.
Our planet is facing serious changes, and this can indeed be daunting, but we also see a new generation of knowledgeable scientists that are getting prepared to face the problems ahead.
The project team during a walk in the Rokua National Park, observing the differences between forested areas and pristine forests. (Photo: Eva Skarbøvik).
How will rural land use change and affect our waters?
BIOWATER continues to develop scenarios for land use in a Nordic setting, where the underlying idea is that we are moving towards a future with bioeconomy. Now the task has come to prepare these scenarios for catchment models, so we can predict what will happen to our freshwaters if the land use changes. Stakeholder inputs from workshops and interviews are being analyzed, and the models are being prepared to fit a set of selected catchments. We are looking at possible future changes both in agricultural and forested areas, and intend to predict how nutrient, sediments and carbon will change in the waters of these landscapes.
Not just models, but also long-term datasets can help us understand how changes in land use will affect our freshwaters. BIOWATER has developed a metadatabase of long-term data in small agricultural and forested catchments in the four countries. These will be used to assess how different land use practices and management can affect water quality. A cross-Nordic paper on this is expected to be developed in spring 2020.
How will the green shift affect rivers and lakes, and in turn the services provided to us from the ecosystems? (Photo: E. Skarbøvik)
And how will these changes, in turn, affect us?
Ecosystem services is a relatively new concept, depicting the many benefits that we gain from well-functioning ecosystems. A comprehensive questionnaire has been conducted in the Nordic countries, to assess how recreation and tourism may be affected by any deterioration of landscapes and waters. The next step is to combine the data from these questionnaires with data from the natural sciences in BIOWATER, to assess how ecosystem services can be affected by the green shift. Hence, a truly transdisciplinary study of both the cultural, regulating, provisioning and supporting services that we receive from our ecosystems.
2020 camp: Conveying results and working across disciplines
Our next annual camp will be in Norway in May 2020. Instead of a traditional PhD course, we will this time educate both the PhDs and the other scientists in how to bridge the gap between science and policy makers, as well as look deeper into the challenges of transdisciplinary cooperation. We will of course also work on our common targets to evaluate how the green shift will affect the rural landscape, freshwater resources, and in the end, ourselves!
One of the many lakes in Finnish Rokua National Park. (Photo E. Skarbøvik).