Quantifying biomass production for assessing ecosystem services of riverine landscapes.

Society is increasingly in need of renewable resources to replace fossil fuels and to prevent resource depletion. River-floodplain systems are known to provide important societal functions and ecosystem services to mankind, such as production of vegetative biomass. In order to determine the potential of harvesting vegetative riparian biomass, the capacity of river systems to produce such biomass needs to be determined.

Biodiversity recovery following delta-wide measures for flood risk reduction.

Biodiversity declined markedly over the past 150 years, with the biodiversity loss in fluvial ecosystems exceeding the global average. River restoration now aims at flood safety while enhancing biodiversity and has had success locally. However, at the scale of large river distributaries, the recovery remained elusive.

Fish and fisheries in the Lower Rhine 1550-1950: A historical-ecological perspective.

Regulation and intensive use of most of the world's large rivers, has led to dramatic decline and even to extinction of riverine fish populations like salmon and sturgeon in the river Rhine. In general this decline is considered an unwelcome side-effect of the Industrial Revolution and large-scale river regulation (c. 1800), but the deterioration of stocks of some species may have started well before the 19th century.

Historical rise of waterpower initiated the collapse of salmon stocks.

The collapse of Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) stocks throughout North-Western Europe is generally ascribed to large-scale river regulation, water pollution and over-fishing in the 19(th) and 20(th) century. However, other causes have rarely been quantified, especially those acting before the 19(th) century. By analysing historical fishery, market and tax statistics, independently confirmed by archaeozoological records, we demonstrate that populations declined by up to 90% during the transitional period between the Early Middle Ages (c.

Development and application of the SSD approach in scientific case studies for ecological risk assessment.

Species sensitivity distributions (SSDs) are used in ecological risk assessment for extrapolation of the results of toxicity tests with single species to a toxicity threshold considered protective of ecosystem structure and functioning. The attention to and importance of the SSD approach has increased in scientific and regulatory communities since the 1990s. Discussion and criticism have been triggered on the concept of the approach as well as its technical aspects (e.