Rewetting of drained forest wetlands: strategies for implementation and adaptation to future climate.
Background
Over the past 150 years, Sweden has extensively drained forest wetlands to boost forest productivity. However, this drainage has harmed biodiversity, reduced carbon sequestration, increased downstream flooding risks, and weakened forest growth resilience.
Under future climate conditions, keeping large areas of drained forests unrestored could: (1) Heighten the risk of forest fires, droughts, and floods, (2) Amplify CO₂ emissions and further degrade biodiversity, water quality, and people's access to healthy ecosystems for recreation and learning, (3) Trigger new or more frequent infectious disease outbreaks, and (4) Accelerate the spread and damage caused by bark beetles and other pests.
There is strong public interest in reversing these problems by restoring drained wetlands. Yet two critical questions remain: Can restoration fully recover the wide range of environmental and societal benefits that natural wetlands provide? And could restoration itself introduce environmental or societal risks that are still poorly understood?
Duties and responsibilities
- Develop sample protocols and lead field work across 20 sites using a Before-after-control-impact (BACI) framework.
- Measure biodiversity with remote sensing (e.g., bioacoustics for bats & birds, bamera traps, and multi-spectrum drone), environmental DNA (e.g., eDNA and iDNA), and live trapping (e.g., small mammals, mosquitoes and ticks).
- Measure habitat variation via multi-spectrum drone images, and habitat classifiers.
- Measure disease diversity and infection probabilities of small mammal communities and vectors.
Publications
Appear once published.