Urban streams face myriad problems, including altered hydrology and geomorphology, impaired water quality, and degraded biotic assemblages. Despite being some of the most ecologically impaired aquatic systems in the world, managers aim to rehabilitate urban streams to provide ecological functions and increase the societal benefits of these freshwater ecosystems. As such, incorporating the values of people living in cities (e.g., environmental justice, job creation, human safety) is essential. The goal of creating sustainable and resilient urban ecosystems is further complicated by the changing climate, which often exacerbates flooding, droughts, and high temperatures, further impairing already-stressed urban streams and increasing human hazards. Presentations in this session will draw from multiple disciplines (e.g., ecology, engineering, sociology, hydrology, geomorphology, management) and integrate new understandings of urban stream degradation and novel approaches to urban stream rehabilitation based on local and regional efforts from around the world. Topics may include understanding variability in urban streams, developing appropriate restoration endpoints, new approaches to assessing urban stream response, and integrating community voices into restoration planning and decision-making. We will capitalize on the 6th Symposium on Urbanization and Stream Ecology, held in Brisbane immediately prior to this meeting, to provide diverse perspectives from around the world and share creative solutions to the global problem of urban stream rehabilitation.
Inland waters (streams, rivers, lakes, reservoirs, and wetlands) receive large amounts of organic matter from terrestrial ecosystems that are ultimately buried in sediments, transported to adjacent systems, or emitted as greenhouse gasses (GHG) to the atmosphere. Emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) from inland waters are an important component of global GHG budgets, but much uncertainty remains regarding the magnitude and drivers of these fluxes across temporal and spatial scales. In particular, we lack a proper understanding of the effects of climate change and anthropogenic stressors (i.e. land use change, eutrophication, habitat loss, lentification).
In this session, we aim to bring together researchers who study inland water GHG fluxes and how these may alter with increasing anthropogenic pressures and under global change in the future. We welcome contributions that focus on emerging research topics such as: (1) feedback mechanisms between climate change and inland water GHG emissions, (2) the effects of human activities on inland water GHG cycling in inland waters, (3) the role of management practices in reducing inland water GHG emissions, and (4) spatio-temporal trends of GHG fluxes including lateral fluxes between inland waters and wetlands. Presentations from this session will facilitate sharing of new advances in the field, and encourage discussions among contributors for future collaborations.
Predictive ecological models are powerful tools that enhance water resource management. They can help both practitioners and researchers understand the consequences of management decisions as well as inform and evaluate proposed solutions to regulatory concerns. Current uses of ecological models include predicting water quality shifts, evaluating ecological responses under various anthropogenic stressors, and prioritizing locations for conservation and restoration. However, these models are not currently being utilized to their full capacity. Barriers to using these versatile tools include the challenges of distilling complex techniques into relatable regulatory compliance, of communicating results into useable products for non-modelers, and of delivering robust, justifiable conclusions. Dissolving these barriers is increasingly important in a time of changing climate and water use practices.
This session aims to bring together researchers, practitioners, and managers from a range of disciplines, who apply innovative, pragmatic, and diverse uses of ecological models to inform freshwater resource management practices, regulation, and compliance. We invite contributions that explore the use of ecological models applied with single or multiple stressors of management concern. Models can include, but are not limited to, statistical, mechanistic, machine learning, and hybrid approaches that predict various physical and biological processes or drivers. They can be part of wider inter-disciplinary frameworks or stand-alone modeling techniques. Contributions will emphasize the successes (and failures) in making complex ecological models more useful to management applications.
Panel Discussion
Tropical and subtropical rivers and wetlands harbour much of the world’s freshwater biodiversity but are less well studied than their temperate counterparts. Many contemporary anthropogenic threats to rivers, including hydropower development, water pollution and water withdrawals, disproportionately affect tropical systems. However, protection and restoration of tropical freshwater systems, particularly in many developing countries, is hampered by a lack of fundamental knowledge of their ecology. Addressing these environmental challenges requires a multidisciplinary approach that considers social, economic and cultural dimensions of water management. Inter-institutional partnerships and research networks are also essential. The scientific community will not be able to face these challenges alone and the creation of links between public authorities, the private sector and civil society is needed to ensure that research activities are applied and meet societal needs. In this session, presenters will highlight key management issues and knowledge gaps for tropical and subtropical freshwater systems across a range of countries and provide case studies of successful collaborations and partnerships. The focus will be on fostering and supporting research collaborations across the global south.
Panel Discussion
Panel Discussion
Difficulty in morphological species identification, evolving and varying taxon concepts, and nomenclatural changes can lead to significant inconsistencies in taxonomic datasets across analysts and through time. These taxonomic inconsistencies can mask or confound taxon/parameter relationships leading to questionable conclusions, a weakening or loss of species and community signal, and can even constrain the use of large-scale species datasets that do not pass traditional quality control metrics or which cannot be easily merged with other relevant data. These issues are particularly prevalent with the taxonomy of microorganisms, macroinvertebrates, and other groups with significant life-stage changes, but data from most aquatic taxonomic groups show some level of taxonomist bias. Various quality assurance and control efforts have been developed to address these issues prior to and after data collection (e.g., taxonomist certification, image vouchers, intercalibration and identity confirmation exercises, and statistical harmonization) but these efforts are not widely shared. The intent of this session is to present the range of methods being used, across regions and taxonomic groups, to minimize current discrepancies and to reduce inconsistencies in future datasets as well as post-hoc methods being used to harmonize, merge, or salvage existing datasets. We hope to foster communication and collaboration among those working with taxonomic data. Morning presentations will be followed by two afternoon panel discussions. The first will be an open discussion of those efforts presented earlier, including alternatives and ways to collaborate or share ideas going forward. The second discussion will be focused on the Taxonomic Certification Program (TCP) that is overseen by SFS and supported by the society’s strategic plan. We will introduce the TCP in detail with the goal of exploring the role that the TCP can play in advancing taxonomic quality assurance in other regions of the world and develop concrete recommendations for next steps, such as in new SFS international chapters.
Panel Discussion
Wildfires and prescribed burns (including cultural burning) can fundamentally alter terrestrial ecosystem structures such as forest canopy, tree mortality, and soil composition. Changes in the terrestrial landscape influence downstream aquatic ecosystems through their impacts on riparian vegetation and shading, water temperatures, geomorphometry, sedimentation, and nutrient loading. While some of these cascading impacts are well documented, it is less well known how they interact to influence aquatic ecosystem dynamics at multiple spatial scales and across levels of organization from microbial communities to whole ecosystem function. This special session aims to bring together researchers who study the direct and indirect effects of fire on aspects of inland water physics, ecology, and biogeochemistry. We encourage field scale, laboratory, modeling, and predictive studies which investigate both basic (e.g., biogeochemical cycling) and applied (e.g., drinking water management) questions relating to fire impacts of inland waters. We welcome 12-minute oral presentations, 5-minute “lightning-style” oral presentations, and printed posters. We enthusiastically encourage submissions by early career researchers as well as by researchers from BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and other marginalized identities.
Panel Discussion
Panel Discussion