ALFAwetlands summary-2023 and perspectives-2024

In the year 2023 ALFAwetlands project had a great progress towards achieving its main goals, namely: improvement of the geospatial knowledge base of wetland, evaluation of pathways of wetland restorations and provision of information and indicators for sustainability to maximize climate change mitigation, biodiversity and other benefits. 

During 2023 ALFAwetlands 14 +1 partners from 10 European countries continued their research work on 9 project Living Labs and beyond, took part in numerous conferences and other events, joint various meetings with sister projects. Within the ALFAwetlands we also: 

• Started data collection to advance the state-of-the-art of the geo-spatial knowledge base on wetlands for further decision-making  
• Finalised Living Labs Baseline assessment, including methods and Guidance for co-creation and process support ,as well as started the co-creation workshops 
• Progressing with the Harmonised methodologies for further wetlands analyses and data gathering 
• Launched modelling to understand the potential impacts of upscaled wetland restoration options on biodiversity and ecosystem services (BES) provision, as well as changes in BES provision at the EU level for policy-relevant periods and the most policy-relevant climate change mitigation and biodiversity targets  
• Prepared citizens and land-owners surveys regarding values for climate benefits, biodiversity and ecosystem services, co-benefits & trade-offs from wetland restoration 
• Progressing with the identification of the most successful restoration measures in European wetlands and synergies with other projects and initiatives 
• Continuing with experience exchange, project monitoring, evaluation, field visits  and project communication. 

Perspectives 2024

It the upcoming year ALFAwetlands multiskilled international team will continue its great work, together with numerous stakeholders, for the wetlands restoration for the future. 

One of the planned 2024 activities is the conduction of a series of webinars with our sister projects:

 WET HORIZONS, REWET, RESTORE4CS. What makes these sessions truly special, is that they will feature an outstanding work of our PhD students, post-docs, and early-career researchers actively contributing to our shared initiatives. 

We will also conduct our Living Labs Open Days and ALFAwetlands Mid-term Conference in Austria. 

Stay with us for more details in 2024! 

We are wishing you happy Winter Holidays and implementation of all your plans in the upcoming year!

ALFAwetlands team