Project: Context-dependence of the societal and ecological outcomes from river ecosystem restoration

Acronym	COSAR (Reference Number: BiodivRestore-270)
Duration	01/01/2022 - 31/12/2024
Project Topic	River restoration projects have so far mainly focused on recreating local habitat diversity and thereby enhancing biodiversity. This habitat-based, local scale approach has been lately criticized as it does not consider the strong influence of large scale drivers on ecological outcomes. Furthermore, the societal needs for and benefits from restoration are still poorly documented and related to their local and regional context. Conceptualizations of the different relevant scales for restoration management have been developed lately but still lack proper analysis on large datasets of restoration projects, monitored over time. The quick development of new analysis methods allows getting further in integrating different scales of biological and physical patterns and processes to better understand local ecological observations. The COSAR project aims at assessing the influence of spatial and historical context of restoration projects on both their ecological and societal outcomes and related synergies and trade-offs. This project collates existing ecological monitoring data from 200 restoration projects, covering most Central and Northern European river types. In addition social media posts from restored sites will be analyzed to infer ecosystem services and how people interact with restored sites. The project is composed of three work stages. First, we define and quantify ecological and societal metricss of restoration success and integrate them in a framework to investigate their synergies and trade-offs. Second, we contextualize these ecological and societal restoration benefits with European datasets on biotic and abiotic context data at various spatial scales to identify the relevant drivers and scales enhancing or preventing restoration success. In this analysis, we also consider legacy effects of historical environmental conditions. Third, we produce and disseminate an interactive online decision support tool, which can be used by stakeholders to apply the knowledge gained in the first two stages to their own restoration scenarios. Additionally, we provide fact sheets and highlight best practice examples for restoration planning. To ensure a transdisciplinary approach, we pay particular attention to stakeholder involvement at all project stages. Stakeholders represent various interest groups and cover all participating nationalities in the project. They are expected to help identify the relevant set of metrics that will be studied, shape the focus of the context analyses, give advice to ensure the relevance and user-friendliness of the project outputs and act as ambassadors in the dissemination of the project results. With this project design, we provide new knowledge and tools to foster ecological and societal benefits of restoration, facilitate the planning of promising restoration projects and inform the next management plans in order to reach both the goals of the Water Framework Directive and Sustainable Development Goals 3, 6, 14 &15.
Network	BiodivRestore
Call	BiodivRestore Transnational Cofund Call 2020-2021

Project partner

Number	Name	Role	Country
1	INRAE	Coordinator	France
2	University of Applied Sciences Trier	Partner	Germany
3	University of Wageningen	Partner	Netherlands
4	INRAE/University of Paris Saclay	Partner	France
5	Swiss Federal Institue of Aquatic Science and Technology	Partner	Switzerland