Projects

Research project J2-4428 is financed by the Public Research Agency of the Republic of Slovenia from the state budget.

The growing anthropogenic change of inland waters brings a variety of challenges. The project offers a promising perspective that is essential for the protection, conservation and restoration of eutrophic aquatic ecosystems and their functions. The main goal of the project is to use green approaches to improve the problems of eutrophic waters and to quantify their impact on biodiversity and other ecosystem services. We will focus on the biodiversity of primary producers, which are directly related to nutrients in water and represent food for all aquatic animals. In addition, we will link biodiversity data to the assessment of ecosystem services, which will be used to evaluate the improvement of the state of the water body due to the introduction of a certain green solution. In the first part of the project, we will introduce three different green solutions: (i) nutrient management, (ii) risk management of toxic cyanobacteria and (iii) ecological status management based on primary producers by analysis of satellite images. In the second part of the project, we will link green solution indicators with an assessment of improved ecosystem services (cost-benefit assessment). The main purpose of the project is to contribute with scientific data, analyzes and tools to improve water management in the direction of greater resilience of lakes and reservoirs. Synergistic multi-disciplinary cooperation between partners will fill the gap between academia, businesses and government bodies, improve the coherence between theoretical knowledge on the functioning of eutrophic ecosystems and provide concrete guidelines for their conservation and management.