New concept to help set priorities in water management
The basic principle behind most strategies aimed at renaturalising ecosystems is to increase biodiversity by restoring natural habitat structure, which should lead to improved ecosystem services in the process. These projects often do not result in the success researchers had hoped for because the complexity of ecological relationships is so vast that it is difficult to detect the precise ecological factors that have priority over the many others in a particular case. Researchers working at the University of Montana and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) have now developed a theoretical framework - the concept of ecological simplification - aimed at closing this gap. They tested it in two iconic river landscapes: the Missouri River in the U.S. state of Montana and in the Elbe River in Saxony-Anhalt. The results were recently published in the BioScience journal.