BIOWATER hosted a virtual  SWAT scenario workshop on 4-6 November 2020,  and the lecturer was the SWAT expert Dr. Eugenio Molina Navarro from the University of Madrid. Why is this an important topic for BIOWATER? Well, across the Nordic countries we have asked stakeholders of their beliefs about future land uses in a bioeconomy. We have compiled their answers on

The cultivation of new land is a means to increase food production for a growing population. BIOWATER is concerned with what happens to our freshwaters when the land use is changed, and this is a concern that we share with our stakeholders. Based on requests from regional and national authorities, we have therefore conducted a literature survey to increase our

If the bioeconomy does not develop in a sustainable way, the modifications of the rural landscape, in combination with expected climate change, will seriously affect our freshwater resources, and thereby society. This is one of many conclusions in BIOWATER’s special issue “Environmental effects of a green bioeconomy” (Ambio 49-11). There are altogether 12 papers in the issue, and we have

Fatemeh Hashemi and co-authors from the Biowater project were very early keen to investigate the dynamics of nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) forms across the range of Nordic mini-catchments. They wanted to develop “catchment cartoons” that could be used by scientists when communicating results to stakeholders and decision makers. Fatemeh’s newly published paper in the Journal of Water with the

Biowater’s PhD student Mette Vodder Carstensen (University of Aarhus) and co-authors asked themselves: How efficient are mitigation measures targeting nutrient losses from drainage system in the Nordic region? Main author Mette V. Carstensen writes: “This was our first question setting the stage for this study, as despite many initiatives and efforts, the losses of nutrients to our rivers, lakes and

Biowater is proud to announce that Dr. Faisal Bin Ashraf successfully defended his thesis on 29 May 2020. Faisal’s thesis, River regimes and energy demand interactions in Nordic rivers, was well received by the opponents. Dr. Faisal Bin Ashraf is by this our first examined PhD! Faisal has studied at the University of Oulu in Finland. He has analysed the

When we entered 2020, Biowater was half-way. Our original plans for the third Summer Camp was to meet at the Hurdalssjøen Hotel, at a scenery lake site in Norway. We envisaged to continue our tradition with a combination of scientific meetings and social gatherings. However, as with so many other meetings these days, we had to change our plans. Hence,

Peatlands provide habitats for many species and a variety of ecosystem services worldwide. This poses challenges for land-use planners in balancing between increasing use of peatland resources and safeguarding biodiversity and ecosystem services. In a new BIOWATER-paper, an integrated biophysical-economic modeling approach was used to investigate how alternative land-use and land-management (LULM) options jointly affect economic returns from marketed (timber,

Read the entertaining account on how a geographer and ecologist finds herself in a fieldwork related to ecosystem services! The fieldwork was part of the studies of BIOWATER’s PhD-student Bart Immerzeel, to assess how people value the landscape for recreation and other types of cultural ecosystem services. Since Bart is not speaking Finnish, it was necessary to find local researchers

A new paper discusses the climate gas nitrous oxide (N2O) in boreal lakes, using data from 112 lakes in Finland. Lakes and streams act as recipients of carbon, nitrogen, and other nutrients transported from land, but also contribute to landscape greenhouse gasses (GHG) by emitting carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide (N2O). Freshwater N2O has received much less interest compared