Department Aquatic Ecology
Swiss National Assessment of Lake Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (SNALBES)
This project is funded by the SNF NRP82 program "Promoting Biodiversity and Sustainable Ecosystem Services for Switzerland".
Lakes are central to Switzerland’s cultural identity and natural heritage. Yet, despite national legal regulations and its commitments under international conventions, there is currently neither a standardized national overview of the status of biodiversity in Swiss Lakes, nor an assessment of the diverse values that lakes provide to the Swiss population in terms of biodiversity, ecosystem services or Nature’s Contributions to People (NCPs).
The SNALBES project will address these gaps through three work packages (See Fig.1 below):
- The development of a baseline assessment of the state of biodiversity for 240 Swiss lakes distributed along gradients of size, elevation and human impact.
- The development and implementation of a Swiss-wide biological lake assessment, namely producing a prototype for a Modular Stepwise Procedure (MSP), categorizing lakes from poor to very good.
- The plural valuation of the Swiss lakes in terms of biodiversity and most relevant Nature’s Contributions to People (NCPs) that they provide (e.g. habitat, recreation, supporting identities).
Work package 1 (WP1) is focused on answering the following two questions: 1) What is the status of lake biodiversity in Switzerland and how is it affected by climate change and other human impacts? and 2) How can we develop and implement a sustainable Swiss-wide lake-biodiversity sampling program that supports lake management decision making? Together with local, cantonal and federal authorities, the team will develop methods to monitor biodiversity and carry out the first nationwide assessment of more than 200 lakes. These lakes will cover the full spectrum of human influence, from pristine alpine waters to those heavily affected by warming, intensive farming, urbanisation or invasive species such as the Quagga mussel.
In WP2, we will look at how best we can use the biodiversity data collected in WP 1 to assess the biological status of lakes. To address this research question, we will review and evaluate existing biological assessment methods and make recommendations regarding which measured biological variables (e.g. richness, or abundance of certain taxa) are the most sensitive to human impacts. This process will result in a prototype of an MSP that we will then use to conduct the first baseline biological status assessment of Swiss lakes.
Finally, WP3 will assess the diverse (monetary and non-monetary) values of Swiss lakes. The economic analysis will elicit preferences and willingness-to-pay of the Swiss population for improving the biological, chemical and physical status of Swiss lakes, estimate the monetary values of expected changes in lakes’ biodiversity and most relevant NCPs, and identify non-monetary values that the Swiss population associates with lakes (e.g. learning and inspiration).
Project team
Our project is co-led by Anita Narwani, Blake Matthews and Ivana Logar at Eawag, in close collaboration with the Water Division of the Swiss Federal Office of the Environment. Please reach out to our project coordinator (Nadine Fragnière) if you are interested in getting involved.
