Restoration and management of riparian and riverine ecosystems: ecohydrological experiences, tools and perspectives

摘要

It has been believed that the 21st century will be an era of environmental restoration (Sunding, 2011). However, natural, self-sustaining and well-preserved rivers and wetlands nearly disappeared from the map of urbanizing world making the recreation of the resilient ecosystems a challenging goal due to the lack of reference conditions. Mitigation of extensive and multiple human pressures on aquatic ecosystems exacerbated by the stressors originating from the climatic change is therefore oriented at preservation of the well-conserved ecosystems that remained, in additional to restoring the most important ecological functions of these systems. Such an approach requires wise, adaptive management. Although numerous national and international treaties, acts and directives oriented at conservation of water bodies have been implemented throughout the continent since the early 2000s, aquatic ecosystems still face a broad spectrum of problems, for example the ecological status of rivers seems to remain at less than the "desirable" state (Ignar and Grygoruk and Acreman 2015). Even at the level of international legislation, some contradictions between particular environmental policy acts have been reported that make ecosystem management a difficult task (Janauer et al., 2015). Such a reality, in spite of improvements in appropriate management implementation efficiency, requires continuous and excessive scientific insight. In this field, the science of ecohydrology has been shown to play the crucial role (J?rgensen, in press; Zalewski, 2013).