IDES

The Danube crosses ten countries, running over 2,800 kilometres from source to mouth. 80 million people live in the Danube river basin, with diverse, sometimes conflicting demands and interests in the rivers and lakes. This requires internationally coordinated strategies for water quality management.

The high nutrient loads in the Danube influence its ecological status and must be reduced. These often originate from agriculture or wastewater. As near-natural areas, floodplains can help to reduce nutrient inputs as well as retain nutrients in rivers. Additionally, they are habitats and recreational areas. Like rivers, floodplains provide many services for society. However, human demands have often been managed and regulated separately. This affects coordinated management measures and the balancing of different interests (e.g. of agriculture or nature conservation). At the same time, water quality has rarely been taken into account.

Therefore, the goals of IDES are:

• Development of scenarios to improve the retention of plant nutrients in floodplains
• Comprehensive assessment of the multiple ecosystem services (ES) of floodplains and their changes in these scenarios
• Development of an integrated concept for the management of floodplains in cooperation with stakeholders and decision-makers

The project continues the River Ecosystem Service Index (RESI) developed at IGB and will apply the concept of an integrative evaluation of ES to the entire Danube region. For this purpose, existing evaluation methods in the Danube region will be harmonized and adapted for an "IDES tool". A spatial analysis will assess the drivers of water quality and ES in the floodplains along the Danube and its tributaries. For this purpose, the nutrient emissions in the entire basin area will be modelled with the IGB model MONERIS.

The IDES tool will be applied in case studies in Austria, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia and Hungary to assess the impact of management scenarios on ES. Stakeholders will be trained in its application.