Water information systems for aquatic ecosystem protection
Key points
- Aquatic ecosystems provide several services for producing, regulating and structuring on different time and spatial scales;
- Organizing the access and processing of datasets improves our understanding of how ecosystems provide services and how changes to ecosystems impact service provision.
As a subset of ecosystems, inland surface aquatic ecosystems related to rivers, lakes and wetlands are a key component of integrated water resources management.
A wide variety of aquatic ecosystems exist, and although they represent a low percentage of the Earth’s surface, their roles and functions make them crucial. An aquatic ecosystem in good condition can carry out diverse functions that can be grouped into several families:
- Production functions, which mostly concern the production of organic matter, the availability of non-renewable resources like water, and mineral substances;
- Regulation functions – the way ecosystems function contributes to stabilizing the variability of natural processes (climate, natural risks, etc.) and resource flows (soil water retention). They also play a role in eliminating the transformation of toxins (water self-purification);
- Organization (or structuring) functions - these contribute to defining the system’s self-organization rules. They involve the physical organization of systems (landscape structuring) and their biological organization (biodiversity).
Ecosystem services can be considered on different time and spatial scales, and can be apprehended at different levels, from local level (protection against natural risks, water sanitation, cultural functions) and national level (a country’s water resources, national basins) to international level (transboundary basins, world water cycle, fight against climate change, etc.). They also vary over time: the water cycle takes place over the whole biosphere. Current datasets provide a reliable tool for understanding how ecosystems provide services and how changes to ecosystems impact service provision.
Describing the status and diversity of aquatic ecosystems is based on structuring parameters that determine their functioning characteristics.
From remote sensing to crowdsourcing, and including data produced by many national and basin organizations, the data sources for this characterization are multiple.
As ecosystems are heterogeneous and the provision of ecosystem services varies across space and time, geographic information systems (GIS) provide a powerful tool for visualizing and analysing the provision of ecosystem services within a landscape.