A review of the processes and effects of droughts and summer floods in rivers and threats due to climate change on current adaptive strategies

Europe is expected to experience a greater frequency of floods and droughts as precipitation and evapotranspiration patterns are modified by climate change in future. Several large scale drought and flooding events have occurred in Europe since 2000. Studies of drought are rare but indicate important impacts on freshwater habitats, water quality, plants and animals, which may have wider consequences for ecosystem functioning. The main factors determining the impacts of droughts and floods are event duration and seasonality of the event. A diverse habitat distribution and the presence of refugia at the reach scale confer the most resilience against droughts and floods. Management measures will also be impacted particularly with regard to riparian zones, channel morphology, flow and floodplain connectivity. However there is a conflict between management actions that target the effects of drought, and those that target floods. This report reviews information on droughts and aseasonal floods (summer floods) published since 2000 with a principal focus on small lowland rivers. Using several recent (post 2000) reviews on these topics, we describe abiotic and biotic effects of droughts and floods, providing recent European examples where possible. We explain the current status of droughts and summer floods in Europe, and where the main sources of data can be found. We highlight the threats posed by these phenomena to some of the most common current adaptive management strategies in place in the EU. To this end we use measures already described within REFRESH under Deliverables 1.1 and 1.2, and we focused solely on adaptive measures relating to riparian zones, channel morphology, flow and floodplain connectivity

WELL-TO-TANK Report Version 4.0 : JEC WELL-TO-WHEELS ANALYSIS

This part of the study describes the process of producing, transporting, manufacturing and distributing a number of fuels suitable for road transport powertrains. It covers all steps from extracting, capturing or growing the primary energy carrier to refuelling the vehicles with the finished fuel.JRC.F.8-Sustainable Transpor

WELL-TO-TANK Report version 4.a: JEC WELL-TO-WHEELS ANALYSIS

This part of the study describes the process of producing, transporting, manufacturing and distributing a number of fuels suitable for road transportJRC.F.8-Sustainable Transpor

Streams and rivers: report card 2020

This report card covers the effects of drought and water scarcity on streams and rivers, the ecosystem response, future impact scenarios and possible mitigation actions. One of a series of report cards summarising current and future aspects of water scarcity in the UK's main ecosystems

Investigating river wetted habitat sensitivity to flow change

This project aimed to improve the understanding of the response of river wetted habitat (represented by wetted perimeter WP) to change in flow (Q) in order to support ecological status and potential assessment in UK rivers impacted by abstraction/flow regulation, which is of high relevance to dam and hydropower scheme design. The analysis relied on a pool of >1,000 UK sites with good quality hydraulic data. A method to assess objectively WP sensitivity to Q was developed, which models WP as a function of Q in a consistent manner, then identifies three different sensitivity zones and corresponding flow thresholds mathematically (ranging from high sensitivity occurring at lower flows, medium sensitivity, and low sensitivity at higher flows). The study then investigated if wetted habitat sensitivity patterns could be related to catchment/river reach types. For c. two thirds of sites, WP was found highly sensitive to flow change at Q95 (5th percentile) or below, suggesting generic environmental flow values can mask variations in hydraulic sensitivity; there was no site featuring low WP sensitivity below Q95. Regarding typology, statistically significant patterns between sensitivity thresholds/ slopes and river types based on key catchment descriptors (area, altitude, permeability) were found; WP tend to be more sensitive to Q at higher flows for sites associated with smaller, lower elevation, and/or lower permeability catchments; sites with larger, higher elevation, and/or lower permeability catchments may feature sharper differences between sensitivity zones

Lakes and reservoirs: report card 2020

This report card covers the effects of drought and water scarcity on lakes and reservoirs, the ecosystem response, impact scenarios and possible mitigation actions. One of a series of report cards summarising current and future aspects of water scarcity in the UK's main ecosystems

WELL-TO-WHEELS Report version 4.a : JEC WELL-TO-WHEELS ANALYSIS

The JEC research partners [Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, EUCAR and CONCAWE] have updated their joint evaluation of the well-to-wheels energy use and greenhouse gas emissions for a wide range of potential future fuel and powertrain options. This document reports on the fourth release of this study replacing Version 3c published in July 2011. The original version was published in December 2003.JRC.F.8-Sustainable Transpor

Executing multi-taxa eDNA ecological assessment via traditional metrics and interactive networks

Current approaches to ecological assessment are limited by the traditional morpho-taxonomic methods presently employed and the inability to meet increasing demands for rapid assessments. Advancements in high throughput sequencing now enable rapid high-resolution ecological assessment using environmental DNA (eDNA). Here we test the ability of using eDNA-based ecological assessment methods against traditional assessment of two key indicator groups (diatoms and macroinvertebrates) and show how eDNA across multiple gene regions (COI, rbcL, 12S and 18S) can be used to infer interactive networks that link to ecological assessment criteria. We compared results between taxonomic and eDNA based assessments and found significant positive associations between macroinvertebrate (p < 0.001 R2 = 0.645) and diatom (p = 0.015, R2 = 0.222) assessment metrics. We further assessed the ability of eDNA based assessment to identify environmentally sensitive genera and found an order of magnitude greater potential for 18S, versus COI or rbcL, to determine environmental filtering of ecologically assessed communities. Lastly, we compared the ability of traditional metrics against co-occurrence network properties of our combined 18S, COI and rbcL indicator genera to infer habitat quality measures currently used by managers. We found that transitivity (network connectivity), linkage density and cohesion were significantly associated with habitat modification scores (HMS), whereas network properties were inconsistent with linking to the habitat quality score (HQS) metric. The incorporation of multi-marker eDNA network assessment opens up a means for finer scale ecological assessment, currently limited using traditional methods. While utilization of eDNA-based assessment is recommended, direct comparisons with traditional approaches are difficult as the methods are intrinsically different and should be treated as such with regards to future research. Overall, our findings show that eDNA can be used for effective ecological assessment while offering a wider range of scope and application compared to traditional assessment methods

Agricultural productivity in past societies: toward an empirically informed model for testing cultural evolutionary hypotheses

Agricultural productivity, and its variation in space and time, plays a fundamental role in many theories of human social evolution. However, we often lack systematic information about the productivity of past agricultural systems on a scale large enough to test these theories properly. The effect of climate on crop yields has received a great deal of attention resulting in a range of empirical and process-based models, yet the focus has primarily been on current or future conditions. In this paper, we argue for a “bottom-up” approach that estimates potential productivity based on information about the agricultural practices and technologies used in past societies. Of key theoretical interest is using this information to estimate the carrying high quality historical and archaeological information about past societies in order to infer the temporal and geographic patterns of change in agricultural productivity and potential. We discuss information we need to collect about past agricultural techniques and practices, and introduce a new databank initiative that we have developed for collating the best available historical and archaeological evidence. A key benefit of our approach lies in making explicit the steps in the estimation of past productivities and carrying capacities, and in being able to assess the effects of different modelling assumptions. This is undoubtedly an ambitious task, yet promises to provide important insights into fundamental aspects of past societies, enabling us to test more rigorously key hypotheses about human socio-cultural evolution