WetKit Hydro-ES : Wetland Toolkit for Hydrological Ecosystem Services

Last changed: 04 October 2024
Two persons in a boat. Photo.

The overall goal of this project was to provide practitioners, land owners, water managers and relevant authorities with a toolkit to evaluate and promote the implementation of wetlands in agricultural landscapes. This toolkit will support a holistic and multi-functional approach to climate adaptation in line with existing socio-economic and institutional contexts by optimizing the delivery of hydrologically related ecosystem services (ES) with a view to maximizing co-benefits whilst minimizing negative consequences.

Different measurements of constructed wetlands were performed, together with compilations of earlier measurement results and modelling with different tools.

Results

The film Wetlands - a part of our nature.

Final report Våtmarkers hydrologiska ekosystemtjänster och multifunktion: WetKit Hydro-ES: Wetland toolkit for hydrological ecosystem services (in Swedish with English summary)

The conference "Rätt våtmark på rätt plats" by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency.

Research questions

  1. What is the impact of constructed agricultural wetlands on hydrologic processes at ​a local and a catchment scale?
  2. What is the best way to optimize wetland multifunctionality?
  3. Controlled and uncontrolled factors influencing wetland hydrologic functioning and ​multifunctionality?
  4. How are agricultural wetlands perceived by relevant stakeholders?

The project is focusing on three aspects of constructed agricultural wetlands:

  1. Hydrological ES which increases as resilience to extreme climate events (flood and drought mitigation, wetter soils, groundwater recharge, evaporative cooling),
  2. Other benefits (nutrient retention, carbon sequestration, maintenance of biodiversity) and
  3. Related trade-offs (loss of productive land, greenhouse gas (GHG) production).

Participants

The project leader was Martyn Futter from the Department of Aquatic Sciences and Assessment (SLU). From the same department did also Dennis Collentine, Faruk Djodjic, Pia Geranmayeh, Tong Liu and Mike Peacock participate. Other participants are Joachim Audet (University of Aarhus), Malgorzata Blicharska and Henrik Josefsson (Uppsala University) and Johan Heurgren (Heurgren Film AB).