There is a call for urgent global change to how we manage and model river ecosystems. This call was led by a team of international experts including La Trobe University ecologist Nick Bond, led by the University of Canterbury. The Director of La Trope's Center for Freshwater Ecosystems, Professor Bond, said that a change in river management is crucial as extreme weather events become more frequent and severe.
Speaking further, Professor Bond said that this is something of a call to arms for a greater emphasis on assessing long-term risks and understanding how management decisions made today might play out into the future.
Although extreme events like floods and droughts are an integral part of the natural variability that shapes river ecosystems, as they grow more extreme and frequent, the capacity for populations to recover may be more difficult. It requires a greater understanding of how societies are affected as to understanding those risks and identifying potential tipping points. This call to action has been published in Nature.
Dr. Jonathan from the University of Canterbury Rutherford Discovery Fellow contends that we can no longer solely aim to restore river ecosystems to historical or 'natural' states because often, and increasingly, those states are themselves changing. According to Jonathan, we are ill-equipped to tackle river management challenges because current tools no longer work amid increasing climatic uncertainty.
With the world changing so fast, there is danger of losing the services that river ecosystems provide to society. There is a need to move from traditional approaches to managing rivers, to tools that can anticipate future shocks and manage adaptively to protect valuable species and ecosystems services.
As he explained, Professor Bond noted that while the basic modeling approaches exist, they have rarely been used in river management. He said that this is mainly due to the essential biological data is often lacking. Such data are costly for scientists and agencies to collect. For instance, measuring survival and reproductive success can take years to measure, and thus requires long-term funding and commitment.
In New Zealand and even around the world, rivers are under extreme pressure. In times of such rapid environmental change, there is a need to manage rivers for resilience. Large fish kills and droughts are increasingly frequent globally, including in Australia's Murray-Darling Basin, Europe's Rhine River, and across California.
Dr. Tonkin emphasized that this paper is a call for the uptake of these approaches to allow for a scientifically robust basis for managing for resilience in rivers under climate change. Also, rivers need to be managed for people. So, we have a significant task ahead of us that requires collaboration between scientists, conservationists, water managers, and policymakers.
