After almost three years of running the AQUACROSS case study at the Ringsjön and Rönne catchment in Skåne, Sweden, Romina Martin, post-doctoral researcher at Stockholm University’s Stockholm Resilience Centre presented preliminary results at the annual Ringsjön water council meeting on 31 May 2018 in Höör, Sweden. She also  discussed current questions related to model and scenario analyses.

In case study 6, Stockholm Resilience Centre, together with Höör municipality, aim to understand the social-ecological co-production of aquatic ecosystem services in Rönneå catchment area in Southern Sweden. The study has focused on how social (e.g. water governance) and ecological (e.g. species interactions) processes interact and affect (through trade-offs and synergies) the provision of ecosystem services. The case study has investigated these aspects through a participatory process: workshops on local (municipality) and regional (with water councils, water authorities, county administrative boards, land-owners) levels, and follow-up interviews. Participation in the Water Council Meeting was a continuation of this participatory approach, with Romina emphasising that ‘staying in contact with the members from water councils is important because we learn a lot from the challenges they have to deal with at Ringsjön’.

At this stage, it was important to reconnect and align assumptions for multiple scenarios based on earlier workshops and interviews, which are being analysed in the final stages of the AQUACROSS project. Of particular interest for stakeholders was the question of how lake water quality influences the aquatic ecosystem services in the lower river catchment over time. Case Study 6 will answer this question by extending a previously developed stylised model, which examines time lags to restore a lake polluted by nutrient pollution under different management regimes (Martin and Schlüter 2015). Romina is excited to extend this model for an ecosystem service analysis since non-linear changes over time and the fact that ecosystem services are co-produced (Palomo et al. 2016) are rarely integrated into model-based scenario analyses. Case Study 6’s final results will be reported in their case study report, which is forthcoming in the final months of the project.

Referred publications:

• Martin R and Schlüter M (2015). “Combining system dynamics and agent-based modeling to analyze social-ecological interactions – an example from modeling restoration of a shallow lake” Frontiers in Environmental Science 3(66).
• Palomo, I., Felipe-Lucia, M. R., Bennett, E. M., Martín-López, B. & Pascual, U. Disentangling the Pathways and Effects of Ecosystem Service Co-Production. Adv. Ecol. Res. (2016). doi:10.1016/bs.aecr.2015.09.003