Grounding the landscape scale restoration for biogeochemical services on cumulative impact assessment: a process-based approach

This post contains a link to our team’s presentation at the 14th European Conference on Ecological Restoration in Tartu, Estonia. The presentation is in PDF format. Its abstract is inserted below, and the conference program is available here.

ABSTRACT
Here, we present a project that triggers the mutual reinforcement between the restoration industry and other environmental business sectors using the institutional framework of cumulative impact assessment (CIA), as part of the procedures for environmental impact assessment (EIA) and for strategic environmental assessment (SEA). The problem is the impact of many types of projects on decarbonization, retention of nutrients, and of heavy metals provided by head and intermediate catchments with mining and smelting industries. Including ecosystem services (ES) in CIA is currently limited to mapping ES production and scenarios of ES change by spatially distributed impacts. We add to this screening stage of CIA a processes-based stage coupling the service-providing units of plants and biogeochemical processes by aboveground and belowground functional traits. The first step of the second CIA stage is a spatial multifactorial diagnosis of the trees’ stress under atmospheric and soil pollution at 100×100 m2 resolution, with potential consequences on elements budgets in the soil-plant-atmosphere system via functional traits. Another step consists of a LIDAR and geophysical methods-based upscaling of the aboveground and root traits data from tree scale to catchment and floodplains level. This will be coupled with the data from the integrated forest and water monitoring in a Critical Zone Observatory and simulations of the production of the biogeochemical services using mathematical models for predicting the migration of pollutants, taking into account vegetation traits on hillside areas and floodplain areas. The last step is prioritizing forest management actions, restoration of contaminated ecosystems, remediation of tailings and mining dumps, and forested treatment wetlands for acid mine drainage. The technological development of the CIA process and instrumental technologies needed is hosted by an innovation ecosystem supported by ontologies, pre-legislative research, and procedures for pilot integration of pollution monitoring and management in headwater catchments and floodplain sectors.