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Climate change is altering the hydrology of Canadian rivers to an unprecedented degree. Consequently, sustainable freshwater management practices need to adapt, which include the development of integrated water resource strategies and environmental flow recommendations. A particular challenge arises for these assessments due to the highly diverse nature of river ecosystems across Canada. This diversity can be addressed by using a classification system to create manageable spatial units. Building upon and adapting the results of a global river reach classification scheme, we present a multidisciplinary K-means clustering approach to categorize all river reaches of Canada into 23 types at fine spatial resolution. The typology is based on classifier variables related to hydrology, mostly derived from modelled long-term means of monthly discharges, physiography, climate, and fluvial geomorphology. Resulting maps provide baseline information for rivers of all size classes, from small headwater streams to very large rivers, across the entire country, including unmonitored regions such as the High Arctic. The classification system also points to some strategic expansion opportunities for the current Canadian monitoring network of river gauging stations.

Andean forests decreased in area over the past decade, and communities throughout the Andes are experiencing environmental degradation and soil fertility loss. But amid deforestation, forests returned to some Andean regions, producing local ‘forest transitions’, or net increases in forest cover. The mechanisms that drive these local transitions – often in part the actions of residents – are still little studied, but hold key information for creating successful forest and landscape restoration interventions. This paper investigates cloud forest cover dynamics in Intag, a region in northwest Andean Ecuador where people were actively reforesting by planting trees. We used remote sensing analysis of LANDSAT imagery (from 1991, 2001, and 2010) and household surveys and oral histories with residents of four communities. Results from remote sensing show that prior to reforestation projects (before 2001), deforestation rates were high (> 3%/year). But from 2001 to 2010 forest recovery surpassed deforestation – a local forest transition (net 3% forest cover). But although deforestation rates slowed precipitously (< 2%) people continued to clear forests in the highlands even as forests regrew around communities. This change in clearing rates and spatial redistribution of forest cover reflects people’s reasons for planting trees – to restore water and other key ecosystem services perceive to be ‘scarce’. The results point to a new ‘path’ by which forest transitions occur – the ecosystem service scarcity path – in which local demand for forest ecosystem services drive forest recovery.

Canada will be unable to meet its greenhouse gas pledges—of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 30% over 2005 levels by 2030—without transitioning away from the current high-carbon economy. This transition will bring new challenges, especially to the Canadian boreal zone. The boreal zone continues to experience intensive natural resource activities including the extraction of forest, mining, oil and gas, and renewable energy products, which in combination with climate change, is placing the future sustainability of the boreal zone at risk. We explored policy options to reduce the risk to the future sustainability of the boreal zone in light of the inevitable energy transition to either a higher or a lower dependence on carbon and the uncertainty of society’s capacity to adapt to change. Current policies are putting us on a path towards failure to achieve sustainability of the boreal zone. While current policies may be moving us towards a low-carbon future, they lack a shared vision of what the energy transition will be and engagement by those members of society most impacted; they are top-down, prescriptive, and fragmented, and they lack capacity, accountability, and enforcement. Together these limitations create barriers to society’s capacity to adapt to the low-carbon future. Sustainability of the boreal zone will not only require a transition to a low-carbon economy but will require policies that overcome these barriers and create a higher capacity for society to adapt.

The Canadian boreal zone provides extractive goods and services (provisioning ecosystem services (PrES)) to domestic and global markets and makes a significant contribution to the Canadian economy. The intensity and location of these extractive activities, however, may positively or negatively affect the availability of other benefits that the Canadian and global society receive from the boreal. Where PrES compete, managing these activities along with their impacts to boreal ecosystems becomes a balancing act between the need for resource extraction and the continued availability of the other benefits from ecosystems. Management measures and policies are more likely to succeed if they are designed with foresight, which means accounting for how demand, a key driver of change in the boreal, may change in the future. To help this process, we present three divergent, yet plausible future scenarios based on the analysis of: (i) the capacity of the boreal to provide wood products, fossil fuels, metals and minerals, and hydropower and other renewables; (ii) past trends (1985–2015) and key events in the demand for these PrES; (iii) the interaction of demand for PrES with other drivers of change to the boreal zone; and (iv) the synergies and trade-offs between PrES. We find that historically and currently the capacity of the boreal to provide these PrES exceeds the amount currently supplied. However, the capacity of different PrES and location of extractive activities are spatially dispersed creating a spatial and temporal patchwork of associated risks to local ecosystem integrity and the supply of non-PrES. In addition, these scenarios suggest that the future of boreal PrES is very uncertain and highly dependent on how other drivers of change (namely governance and geopolitics, societal values and climate change) play out in the future. Given the spatial complexity, we find that the cumulative effect of these drivers (e.g., climate change) will determine what paths unfold for different areas of the boreal, and we conclude that careful consideration and planning must be given to ensure that the balance between PrES and non-PrES is maintained.

Regulating ecosystem services (ES) fundamentally underpin biosphere integrity, human safety, and the provision of most other ES. However, the pathways by which regulating ES generate benefits for people are complex and vary spatially and temporally. Emerging ES decision-making frameworks underemphasize regulating services because they focus on ES that have more obvious links to human wellbeing (e.g., in close proximity to beneficiaries with very short time lags). Lack of attention towards regulating ES can lead to unintended management trade-offs that create risk for human wellbeing and can cause immediate and delayed impacts on cultural and provisioning ES. Therefore, a remaining challenge for ES frameworks is to address the full ensemble of processes and feedbacks whereby ecosystems contribute to human wellbeing over time, including through regulating services. We address this challenge by (i) reviewing the complexities associated with regulating ES components—capacity, ecological pressures, and demand, (ii) exploring the spatial and temporal variability that influence regulating ES components, including the flow of service benefits, and (iii) illustrating the interdependency of regulating ES components through examples of ES that are linked hydrologically. We conclude that ES capacity, pressure, demand and the flow of benefits are distinct, but intricately linked components that influence how regulating ES provide benefits and improve human wellbeing. We pose that ES assessment frameworks could be improved by including indicators of regulating ES that differentiate between the capacity to provide a regulating ES, the demand for the same, and the actual service that is conveyed, the latter of which is influenced by underlying capacity and ecological pressure. These indicators should also be spatially and temporally explicit to fully incorporate the dynamic influence of temporal variability, spatial scale, and landscape configuration on regulating ES and the benefits they yield.

1.Increasing demand for benefits provided by riverine ecosystems threatens their sustainable provision. The ecosystem service concept is a promising avenue to inform riverine ecosystem management, but several challenges have prevented the application of this concept. 2.We quantitatively assess the field of riverine ecosystem services’ progress in meeting these challenges. We highlight conceptual and methodological gaps, which have impeded integration of the ecosystem service concept into management. 3.Across 89 relevant studies, 33 unique riverine ecosystem services were evaluated, for a total of 404 ecosystem service quantifications. Studies quantified between one and 23 ecosystem services, although the majority (55%) evaluated three or less. Among studies that quantified more than one service, 58% assessed interactions between services. Most studies (71%) did not include stakeholders in their quantification protocols, and 34% developed future scenarios of ecosystem service provision. Almost half (45%) conducted monetary valuation, using 16 methods. Only 9% did not quantify or discuss uncertainties associated with service quantification. The indicators and methods used to quantify the same type of ecosystem service varied. Only 3% of services used indicators of capacity, flow, and demand in concert. 4.Our results suggest indicators, data sources, and methods for quantifying riverine ecosystem services should be more clearly defined and accurately represent the service they intend to quantify. Furthermore, more assessments of multiple services across diverse spatial extents and of riverine service interactions are needed, with better inclusion of stakeholders. Addressing these challenges will help riverine ecosystem service science inform river management. 5.Synthesis and applications. The ecosystem service concept has great potential to inform riverine ecosystem management and decision making processes. However, this review of riverine ecosystem service quantification uncovers several remaining research gaps, impeding effective use of this tool to manage riverine ecosystems. We highlight these gaps and point to studies showcasing methods that can be used to address them. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

The HydroATLAS database provides a standardized compendium of descriptive hydro-environmental information for all watersheds and rivers of the world at high spatial resolution. Version 1.0 of HydroATLAS offers data for 56 variables, partitioned into 281 individual attributes and organized in six categories: hydrology; physiography; climate; land cover & use; soils & geology; and anthropogenic influences. HydroATLAS derives the hydro-environmental characteristics by aggregating and reformatting original data from well-established global digital maps, and by accumulating them along the drainage network from headwaters to ocean outlets. The attributes are linked to hierarchically nested sub-basins at multiple scales, as well as to individual river reaches, both extracted from the global HydroSHEDS database at 15 arc-second (~500 m) resolution. The sub-basin and river reach information is offered in two companion datasets: BasinATLAS and RiverATLAS. The standardized format of HydroATLAS ensures easy applicability while the inherent topological information supports basic network functionality such as identifying up- and downstream connections. HydroATLAS is fully compatible with other products of the overarching HydroSHEDS project enabling versatile hydro-ecological assessments for a broad user community., Measurement(s)hydro-environmental characteristics • watershed • drainage basin • river • stream • hydrographic featureTechnology Type(s)digital curationSample Characteristic - Environmentfreshwater environment • aquatic environmentSample Characteristic - LocationEarth (planet) Machine-accessible metadata file describing the reported data: 10.6084/m9.figshare.10059551

Effectively conserving ecosystem services in order to maintain human wellbeing is a global need that requires an understanding of where ecosystem services are produced by ecosystems and where people benefit from these services. However, approaches to effectively identify key locations that have the capacity to supply ecosystem services and actually contribute to meeting human demand for those services are lacking at broad spatial scales. We developed new methods that integrate measures of the capacity of ecosystems to provide services with indicators of human demand and ability to access these services. We then identified important areas for three ecosystem services currently central to protected area management in Canada—carbon storage, freshwater, and nature-based recreation—and evaluated how these hotspots align with Canada’s current protected areas and resource development tenures. We find that locations of ecosystem service capacity overlap only weakly (27–36%) with actual service providing areas (incorporating human access and demand). Overlapping hotspots of provision for multiple ecosystem services are also extremely limited across Canada; only 1.2% (∼56 000 km2) of the total ecosystem service hotspot area in Canada consists of overlap between all three ecosystem services. Canada’s current protected area network also targets service capacity to a greater degree than provision. Finally, one-half to two-thirds of current ecosystem service hotspots (54–66%) overlap with current and planned resource extraction activities. Our analysis demonstrates how to identify areas where conservation and ecosystem service management actions should be focused to more effectively target ecosystem services to ensure that critical areas for ecosystem services that directly benefit people are conserved. Further development of these methods at national scales to assess ecosystem service capacity and demand and integrate this with conventional biodiversity and conservation planning information will help ensure that both biodiversity and ecosystem services are effectively safeguarded.

While considerable attention has been given to the measurement of mercury (Hg) and lead (Pb) concentrations and accumulation in detailed peat cores in central Canada, the geographic distribution and density of sampling are generally limited. Here, we use the Ontario Peatland Inventory to examine broad patterns of Hg and Pb concentration with depth, based on 338 peat cores (containing >1500 analyzed samples) from 127 bogs, fens and swamps located in southeastern, northeastern and northwestern sections of Ontario. Overall, Hg concentrations averaged 0.05 μg g −1 and that of Pb averaged 10.8 μg g −1 . Maximum values in the top 50 cm of the profiles are 0.08 μg g −1 and 26.2 μg g −1 for Hg and Pb, respectively. The ratio between these values (surface) and the values from below 100 cm (background), where peat likely accumulated before 1850 and industrial activities were limited, are 2.3 and 6.6 for Hg and Pb, respectively. The highest surface:background concentration ratios are generally found in the westernmost part of the province and in the southeast for Hg and around areas that are more heavily populated for Pb. Our results show that a vast amount of Hg and Pb are stored in Ontarian peatlands, although the spatial distribution of these stores varies. The rapid decomposition of peat in a changing climate could release these pollutants to the atmosphere.

Large hydropower schemes have recently gained renewed interest as a provider of efficient and renewable energy, particularly in developing countries. However, some dams may have widespread effects on hydrological and ecosystem integrity, which reach beyond the scales addressed by typical environmental impact assessments. In this paper we address two main ecological impacts—reduced river connectivity and changes in the natural flow regime—at the scale of the entire Mekong River Basin as an important component of dam evaluations. The goal is to improve our understanding of the effect of individual dams as well as clusters of dams at a very large scale. We introduce two new indices, the River Connectivity Index (RCI) as a tool to measure network connectivity, and the River Regulation Index (RRI) as a measure of flow alteration, and calculate the individual and cumulative impact of 81 proposed dams using HydroROUT, a graph-theory based river routing model. Furthermore, we demonstrate how quantitative weighting, e.g. based on river habitat characterizations or species distribution models, may be included in dam impact assessments. A global comparison of large rivers shows that the Mekong would experience strong deterioration in the fragmentation and flow regulation indices if all dams that are currently under consideration in the basin were built, placing it among other heavily impounded rivers in the world. The results illustrate the importance of considering the location of dams, both relative in the network and relative to other already existing dams. Our approach may be used as an index-based ranking system for individual dams, or to compare basin-wide development scenarios, with the goal of providing guidance for decision makers wishing to select locations for future dams with less environmental impacts and to identify and develop potential mitigation strategies.

Projected climate and environmental change are expected to increase the pressure on global freshwater resources. To prepare for and cope with the related risks, stakeholders need to devise plans for sustainable management of river systems, which in turn requires the identification of management-appropriate operational units, such as groups of rivers that share similar environmental and biological characteristics. Ideally, these units are of a manageable size, and are biotically or abiotically distinguishable across a variety of river types. Here, we aim to address this need by presenting a new global river classification framework (GloRiC) to establish a common vocabulary and standardized approach to the development of globally comprehensive and integrated river classifications that can be tailored to different goals and requirements. We define the GloRiC conceptual framework based on five categories of variables: (1) hydrology; (2) physiography and climate; (3) fluvial geomorphology; (4) water chemistry; and (5) aquatic biology. We then apply the framework using hydro-environmental attributes provided by a seamless high-resolution river reach database to create initial instances of three sub-classifications (hydrologic, physio-climatic, and geomorphic) which we ultimately combine into 127 river reach types at the global scale. These supervised classifications utilize a mix of statistical analyses and expert interpretation to identify the classifier variables, the number of classes, and their thresholds. In addition, we also present an unsupervised, multivariable k-means statistical clustering of all river reaches into 30 groups. These first-of-their-kind global river reach classifications at high spatial resolution provide baseline information for a total of 35.9 million kilometers of rivers that have been assessed in this study, and are expected to be particularly useful in remote or data-poor river basins. The GloRiC framework and associated data are primarily designed for broad and rapid applicability in assessments that require stratified analyses of river ecosystem conditions at global and regional scales; smaller-scale applications could follow the same conceptual framework yet use more detailed data sources.