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The partitioning of precipitation (P) water input on land between green (evapotranspiration, ET) and blue (runoff, R) water fluxes distributes the annually renewable freshwater resource among sectors and ecosystems. We decipher the worldwide pattern and key determinants of this water flux partitioning (WFP) and investigate its predictability based on a machine learning (ML) model trained and tested on data for 3,614 hydrological catchments around the world. The results show considerably higher WFP to the green (ET/P) than the blue (R/P) flux in most of the world. Land-use changes toward expanded agriculture and forestry will increase this WFP asymmetry, jeopardizing blue-water availability and making it more vulnerable to future P changes for other sectors and ecosystems. The predictive ML-model of WFP developed in this study can be used with climate model projections of P to assess future blue and green water security for various regions, sectors, and ecosystems around the world.

Coastaleutrophicationis a major issue worldwide, also affecting the Baltic Sea and its coastal waters. Effective management responses to coastal eutrophication require good understanding of the interacting coastal pressures from land, the open sea, and the atmosphere, and associatedcoastal ecosystemimpacts. In this study, we investigate how research on Baltic coastal eutrophication has handled these interactions so far and what key research gaps still remain. We do this through a scoping review, identifying 832 scientific papers with a focus on Baltic coastal eutrophication. These are categorized in terms of study focus, methods, and consideration of coastal system components and land-coast-sea interactions. The coastal component categories include coastal functions (including also socio-economic driver aspects), pressures that are natural (or mediated by a natural process or system) or directly anthropogenic, and management responses. The classification results show that considerably more studies focus on coastal eutrophication pressures (52%) or impacts (39%) than on characterizing the coastal eutrophication itself (20%). Moreover, few studies investigate pressures and impacts together, indicating that feedbacks are understudied. Regarding methods, more studies focus on data collection (62%) than on linking and synthetic methods (44%; e.g., modelling), and very few studies useremote sensing(6%) or participatory (3%) methods. Coastal links with land and open sea are mentioned but much less investigated. Among the coastal functions, studies considering ecological aspects are dominant, but much fewer studies investigate human aspects and the coastal filter function. Among the coastal pressures, studies considering nutrient loads are dominant, but much fewer studies investigate the sources of these loads, especially long-lived legacy sources and possible solutions for their mitigation. Overall, few studies investigate synergies, trade-offs and incentives for various solutions to address cross-scale multi-solution management. Link to the publication:https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896972203337X?via%3Dihub

Hydrochemical constituents in streams may originate from currently active sources at the surface and/or legacy sources from earlier surface inputs, waste deposits and land contamination. Distinction and quantification of these source contributions are needed for improved interpretation of tracer data and effective reduction of waterborne environmental pollutants. This article develops a methodology that recognizes and quantifies some general mechanistic differences in stream concentration and load behavior versus discharge between such source contributions. The methodology is applied to comparative analysis of stream concentration data for chloride (Cl−), copper (Cu), lead (Pb), and zinc (Zn), and corresponding data for water discharge, measured over the period 1990–2018 in multiple hydrological catchments (19 for Cl−, 11 for Cu and Zn, 10 for Pb) around the major Lake Mälaren in Sweden. For Cl−, the average load fraction of active sources is quantified to be 19%, and the average active and legacy concentration contributions as 2.9 and 11 mg/L, respectively. For the metals, the average active load fractions at outlets are 1%–3% over all catchments and 9%–14% in the relatively few catchments with mixed metal sources. Average active and legacy concentration contributions are 0.14 and 3.2 μg/L for Cu, 0.05 and 1.5 μg/L for Pb, and 1.4 and 12 μg/L for Zn, respectively. This multi-catchment analysis thus indicates a widespread prevalence of legacy sources, with greater legacy than active concentration contributions for both Cl−and the metals, and active contributions playing a greater role for chloride than for the metals. The relatively simple first-order methodology developed and applied in the study can be used to screen commonly available stream monitoring data for possible distinction of active and legacy contributions of any hydrochemical constituent in and across various hydrological catchment settings. Available at:https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hyp.14280

There is fragmented understanding of the interactions of environmental and socioeconomic systems, sectors and processes involved in coastal water quality evolution around the world. Environmental policies applying to the coastal environment also have either a land or a sea perspective. As such, the policies may be ill-adapted to support improvements of complex coastal environments that represent the interface of and link the land and sea systems. For instance, environmental regulations in the Baltic Sea region have not yet managed to sufficiently mitigate coastal eutrophication. To make policies relevant and effective, stakeholder perceptions of the environmental and socioeconomic interactions that determine the state of the coastal environment also need to be included in modelling for policy support. Such modelling approaches can facilitate knowledge integration and be a basis for synergistic efforts for coastal environment improvement. For such facilitation and for bridging the gap between land and sea policy perspectives on coastal environmental management, this study considers and models stakeholder-perceived environmental and socioeconomic interactions in a linked land-coast-sea system. To determine stakeholder perceptions of these interactions, multiple actors representing various inland, coastal, and marine sectors in the Swedish water management district Northern Baltic Proper have been engaged in a series of workshops to codevelop a system network diagram (SND) for the district’s land-coast-sea system. The co-developed SND is used in semi-quantitative modelling of coastal water quality behaviour under various human pressure and hydro-climatic conditions. Results show that synergistic multi-scale, transboundary and multi-actor measures are needed to improve coastal water quality, even locally. The measures also need to address the impacts of both currently active sources and legacy sources (accumulated over time from past to-present inputs) of nutrients. A fully-quantitative systems dynamics (SD) model is further developed, based on the system behaviour insights gained from the semi-quantitative interaction modelling. This is used for scenario analysis that can support policy by determining effective nutrient management pathways for meeting coastal water quality challenges under various possible socioeconomic developments along with climatic change. Nutrient contributionsto coastal waters from different sectors in the study region are then quantified considering the water and nutrient exchanges among the sectors and the natural water environments throughout the linked land-coast-sea system. Scenario outcomes are analysed based on a set of key performance indicators for the coastal environment. Such results can guide the development of effective environmental policies for coastal water quality and ecosystem management in the studied Baltic system and other coastal areas around the world. The booklet of abstracts can be found here:https://knowledge4policy.ec.europa.eu/event/2021-eu-conference-modelling-policy-support-collaborating-across-disciplines-tackle-key_en

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-asw-10.1177_11786221211028185 for Current Wildland Fire Patterns and Challenges in Europe: A Synthesis of National Perspectives by Nieves Fernandez-Anez, Andrey Krasovskiy, Mortimer Müller, Harald Vacik, Jan Baetens, Emira Hukić, Marijana Kapovic Solomun, Irena Atanassova, Maria Glushkova, Igor Bogunović, Hana Fajković, Hakan Djuma, George Boustras, Martin Adámek, Miloslav Devetter, Michaela Hrabalikova, Dalibor Huska, Petra Martínez Barroso, Magdalena Daria Vaverková, David Zumr, Kalev Jõgiste, Marek Metslaid, Kajar Koster, Egle Köster, Jukka Pumpanen, Caius Ribeiro-Kumara, Simone Di Prima, Amandine Pastor, Cornelia Rumpel, Manuel Seeger, Ioannis Daliakopoulos, Evangelia Daskalakou, Aristeidis Koutroulis, Maria P. Papadopoulou, Kosmas Stampoulidis, Gavriil Xanthopoulos, Réka Aszalós, Deák Balázs, Miklós Kertész, Orsolya Valkó, David C. Finger, Throstur Thorsteinsson, Jessica Till, Sofia Bajocco, Antonio Gelsomino, Antonio Minervino Amodio, Agata Novara, Luca Salvati, Luciano Telesca, Nadia Ursino, Aris Jansons, Mara Kitenberga, Normunds Stivrins, Gediminas Brazaitis, Vitas Marozas, Olesea Cojocaru, Iachim Gumeniuc, Victor Sfecla, Anton Imeson, Sander Veraverbeke, Ragni Fjellgaard Mikalsen, Eugeniusz Koda, Piotr Osinski, Ana C. Meira Castro, João Pedro Nunes, Duarte Oom, Diana Vieira, Teodor Rusu, Srđan Bojović, Dragana Djordjevic, Zorica Popovic, Milan Protic, Sanja Sakan, Jan Glasa, Danica Kacikova, Lubomir Lichner, Andrea Majlingova, Jaroslav Vido, Mateja Ferk, Jure Tičar, Matija Zorn, Vesna Zupanc, M. Belén Hinojosa, Heike Knicker, Manuel Esteban Lucas-Borja, Juli Pausas, Nuria Prat-Guitart, Xavier Ubeda, Lara Vilar, Georgia Destouni, Navid Ghajarnia, Zahra Kalantari, Samaneh Seifollahi-Aghmiuni, Turgay Dindaroglu, Tugrul Yakupoglu, Thomas Smith, Stefan Doerr and Artemi Cerda in Air, Soil and Water Research

Local SDG action is imperative to reach the 2030 Agenda, but different strategies for progressing on one SDG locally may cause different 'spillovers' on the same and other SDGs beyond local and national borders. We call for research efforts to empower local authorities to 'account globally' when acting locally., Comment: Comment article, 10 pages. Original submission, a later (post peer-review) version is accepted for publication in NPJ Urban Sustainability

Human-induced urban growth and sprawl have implications for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that may not be included in conventional GHG accounting methods. Improved understanding of this issue requires use of interactive, spatial-explicit social–ecological systems modeling. This paper develops a comprehensive approach to modeling GHG emissions from urban developments, considering Stockholm County, Sweden as a case study. GHG projections to 2040 with a social–ecological system model yield overall greater emissions than simple extrapolations in official climate action planning. The most pronounced difference in emissions (39% higher) from energy use single-residence buildings resulting from urban sprawl. And this difference is not accounted for in the simple extrapolations. Scenario results indicate that a zoning policy, restricting urban development in certain areas, can mitigate 72% of the total emission effects of the model-projected urban sprawl. The study outcomes include a decision support interface for communicating results and policy implications with policymakers. Available at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13280-019-01290-y

This study uses controlled numerical experimentation to comparatively simulate and investigate solute transport and concentration responses and patterns in the Baltic Sea for various solute releases from the land through two different coastal cases. These cases are the Swedish Kalmar County coast and the Polish coast of the Vistula River outlet. For equivalent solute releases, the coastal flow conditions and their interactions with main marine currents determine the local coastal solute spreading, while the overall spreading over the Baltic Sea is similar for the two coastal cases, despite their large local differences. For nutrient-proportional solute release scenarios, the highly-populated Vistula catchment yields much greater total, but smaller per-capita nutrient impacts, in the Baltic Sea than the Kalmar County catchment. To be as low as from the Vistula catchment, the per-capita nutrient contribution from Kalmar County would have to be reduced much more than required on average per Swedish inhabitant by the Baltic Sea Action Plan. This highlights an unfairness issue in the per-capita distribution of nutrient load allowance among the Baltic countries, which needs to be considered and handled in further research and international efforts aimed to combat the Baltic Sea eutrophication. Available at:https://doi.org/10.3390/w11071407

This paper is the outcome of a community initiative to identify major unsolved scientific problems in hydrology motivated by a need for stronger harmonisation of research efforts. The procedure involved a public consultation through online media, followed by two workshops through which a large number of potential science questions were collated, prioritised, and synthesised. In spite of the diversity of the participants (230 scientists in total), the process revealed much about community priorities and the state of our science: a preference for continuity in research questions rather than radical departures or redirections from past and current work. Questions remain focused on the process-based understanding of hydrological variability and causality at all space and time scales. Increased attention to environmental change drives a new emphasis on understanding how change propagates across interfaces within the hydrological system and across disciplinary boundaries. In particular, the expansion of the human footprint raises a new set of questions related to human interactions with nature and water cycle feedbacks in the context of complex water management problems. We hope that this reflection and synthesis of the 23 unsolved problems in hydrology will help guide research efforts for some years to come.

In semi-enclosed seas,eutrophicationmay affect both the coastal waters and the whole sea. We develop and test a modelling approach that can account for nutrient loads from land as well as for influences and feedbacks on water quality across the scales of a whole semi-enclosed sea and its coastal zones. We test its applicability in the example cases of the Baltic Sea and one of its localarchipelagos, the Archipelago Sea. For the Baltic Sea scale, model validation shows good representation of surface water quality dynamics and a generally moderate model performance for deeper waters. For the Archipelago Sea, management scenario simulations show that successful sea measures may have the most important effects on coastal water quality. This highlights the need to consistently account for whole-sea water-quality dynamics and management effects, in addition to effects of land drivers, in modelling for characterisation and management of local water quality.

This paper is the outcome of a community initiative to identify major unsolved scientific problems in hydrology motivated by a need for stronger harmonisation of research efforts. The procedure involved a public consultation through online media, followed by two workshops through which a large number of potential science questions were collated, prioritised, and synthesised. In spite of the diversity of the participants (230 scientists in total), the process revealed much about community priorities and the state of our science: a preference for continuity in research questions rather than radical departures or redirections from past and current work. Questions remain focused on the process-based understanding of hydrological variability and causality at all space and time scales. Increased attention to environmental change drives a new emphasis on understanding how change propagates across interfaces within the hydrological system and across disciplinary boundaries. In particular, the expansion of the human footprint raises a new set of questions related to human interactions with nature and water cycle feedbacks in the context of complex water management problems. We hope that this reflection and synthesis of the 23 unsolved problems in hydrology will help guide research efforts for some years to come.

This paper is the outcome of a community initiative to identify major unsolved scientific problems in hydrology motivated by a need for stronger harmonisation of research efforts. The procedure involved a public consultation through online media, followed by two workshops through which a large number of potential science questions were collated, prioritised, and synthesised. In spite of the diversity of the participants (230 scientists in total), the process revealed much about community priorities and the state of our science: a preference for continuity in research questions rather than radical departures or redirections from past and current work. Questions remain focused on the process-based understanding of hydrological variability and causality at all space and time scales. Increased attention to environmental change drives a new emphasis on understanding how change propagates across interfaces within the hydrological system and across disciplinary boundaries. In particular, the expansion of the human footprint raises a new set of questions related to human interactions with nature and water cycle feedbacks in the context of complex water management problems. We hope that this reflection and synthesis of the 23 unsolved problems in hydrology will help guide research efforts for some years to come.

Doctoral thesis, comprehensive summary Eutrophication endangers coastal ecosystems all over the world and is most often associated with an increase in anthropogenic nutrient loads to coastal waters, which fuel the growth of algae and create a variety of environmental problems. This is also the case for the Baltic Sea where coastal waters may be affected by various land, coast-sea, and hydroclimatic drivers and feedbacks, over different scales, including the eutrophic open sea. This thesis aims at improving our understanding of how these drivers affect coastal eutrophication and its management opportunities across the various coupled scales of the Baltic land-coast-sea system. To achieve this aim, the interactions between land-catchment, coastal, and open sea processes, and their influences on coastal eutrophication have been investigated through water quality modelling with applications to specific Baltic coastal waters. Hydroclimatic influences on the propagation of change-impacts through the land-coast-sea continuum to coastal eutrophication have also been investigated via the water quality modelling and additional analysis of actual water quality trends over the last 30 years along the Swedish coast. Moreover, coastal eutrophication research on the Baltic Sea system has been investigated through scientific literature analysis with focus on how the reported research has accounted for and linked components in the land-coast-sea system, and the aim to identify possible research gaps. Results show that impacts of water quality improvements in the open sea propagate to a large share of the coastal waters, especially for phosphorus and phytoplankton, while impacts of reducing nutrient loads from land are more localised and more pronounced for nitrogen than for phosphorus. Therefore, reducing coastal nitrogen, phosphorus and phytoplankton concentrations requires both regional measures for open sea improvements and local land-catchment measures for reduction of nutrient loads to the specific coast. Moreover, data analysis shows that trends in coastal Summer chlorophyll a (Chl-a) are well correlated with those in open sea Summer Chl-a and in riverine nitrogen loads. Regarding hydroclimatic drivers, warmer and wetter conditions are found to complicate remediation of coastal eutrophication in comparison to drier and colder conditions. In addition, trends in coastal Summer Chl-a are well correlated with those in sea-ice conditions. These results highlight the various land-based, coastal, open sea, and hydroclimatic drivers and conditions that mix, interact in and influence the coastal waters. The various driver, management, and ecosystem components involved are overall included in Baltic coastal eutrophication research. However, specific coastal management measures, and feedbacks between drivers and impacts of coastal eutrophication are under-investigated, and the social and ecological components of the whole land-coast-sea system are not well-connected in the research. Furthermore, long-lived legacy sources on land, as well as at sea, have not been much accounted for in coastal eutrophication research so far. This calls for further research on recovery time scales and specific remediation measures that can be effective against such sources, like mussel farming and wetlands. Finally, coastal eutrophication management needs to account for the influences on local coastal conditions from a melting pot of multi-scale drivers and biogeochemical as well as ecological impacts and feedbacks. Available at:http://su.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1604157&dswid=8720