Diversity in Upland Rivers for Ecosystem Service Sustainability - DURESS

英国的水资源每年价值2000亿英镑，英国38.9万公里的河流生态系统可以说是我们最重要的。除了提供水，它们还提供其他主要的生态系统服务，如调节洪水和水质；通过提供能量和养分来支持邻近的生态系统；对有魅力的生物、娱乐和教育有很大的文化价值。然而，生物和生态系统功能在河流中维持这些服务的方式却知之甚少。尽管不断变化的集水区土地利用对河流生物产生了巨大的持续影响，气候变化也对河流生物产生了越来越大的影响。成本影响很大，例如，对休闲渔业、水处理成本和高价值河流生物多样性的影响。相比之下，很少有人考虑通过积极利用管理来增加河流的生态系统服务价值，通过增加有益的河内生物。在本项目中，我们将重点关注被明确选择为生物多样性介导的河流生态系统服务的四个例子：水质调节；分解规律；渔业和休闲垂钓；河鸟作为文化上有价值的生物多样性。它们都面临气候/土地利用变化的风险，说明它们对不同时间尺度上干扰阈值的敏感性。这些服务的市场价值各不相同，而且都需要综合的物理、生物地球化学、生态和社会经济科学观点，而任何项目合作伙伴都无法单独提供这些服务。利用河流微生物、无脊椎动物、鱼类和河流鸟类从基因到食物网的组织水平，我们将测试一个总体假设：“生物多样性是土地利用和气候变化下旱地河流生态系统服务可持续提供的核心”。具体来说，我们会问：1。高地河流提供的服务范围是什么，哪些是生物介导的？2. 生物多样性（从基因到食物网）与服务提供之间的联系是什么？3. 河流生物多样性如何随时间影响生态系统服务提供的速率或弹性？4. 集水区土地利用/管理和气候的变化如何影响河流生物群？5. 如何管理河流生物多样性以维持生态系统服务？在空间尺度上，从小的实验集水区到整个地区，从次年到超过三十年的时间尺度上，这项工作将在威尔士高地进行，威尔士高地是英国一个定义明确的地理区域，在空间广泛和项目所需的长期数据方面特别丰富。

With the UK's water valued at £200 billion p.a., Britain's 389,000 km of river ecosystems are arguably our most important. In addition to providing water, they supply other major ecosystem services such as the regulation of flooding and water quality; support to adjacent ecosystems by supplying energy and nutrients; and large cultural value for charismatic organisms, recreation, and education. However, the ways in which organisms and ecosystem functions maintain these services in rivers are extremely poorly understood. This is despite large ongoing effects on river organisms from changing catchment land use, and increasingly also from climate change. Cost implications are large and result, for example, from impacts on recreational fisheries, water treatment costs, and high value river biodiversity. By contrast, opportunities to use management positively to increase the ecosystem service value of rivers by enhancing beneficial in-river organisms have barely been considered. In this project, we will focus on four examples of river ecosystem services chosen to be explicitly biodiversity-mediated: the regulation of water quality; the regulation of decomposition; fisheries and recreational fishing; and river birds as culturally valued biodiversity. Each is at risk from climate/land use change, illustrating their sensitivity to disturbance thresholds over different time scales. These services vary in attributable market values, and all require an integrated physical, biogeochemical, ecological and socio-economic science perspective that none of the project partners could deliver alone. Using river microbes, invertebrates, fish and river birds at levels of organisation from genes to food webs, we will test the overarching hypothesis that: "Biodiversity is central to the sustainable delivery of upland river ecosystem services under changing land-use and climate". Specifically, we will ask: 1. What is the range of services delivered by upland rivers, and which are biologically mediated? 2. What are the links between biodiversity (from genes to food webs) and service delivery? 3. How does river biodiversity affect the rate or resilience of ecosystem service delivery through time? 4. How do changes in catchment land use/ management and climate affect river biota? 5. How should river biodiversity be managed to sustain ecosystem services? At spatial scales ranging from small experimental catchments to the whole region, and at temporal scales from sub-annual to over three decades, the work will be carried out in upland Wales as a well-defined geographical area of the UK that is particularly rich in the spatially extensive and long-term data required for the project.