A new special issue of the Nature Conservation academic journal released in March 2026 under the title “Wetlands in a Changing Climate: Restoring Coasts and Floodplains”. The outputs collected within are meant to dive into the variety of factors underpinning the importance of wetland ecosystems to biodiversity and climate change. Four thematic dimensions serve to structure the content: vulnerabilities of wetland biodiversity; ecosystem services and nature-based solutions in wetlands; wetland restoration in practice; wetland policy.
Twan Stoffers, who until recently was an expert at the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB) and member of the BioAgora consortium, contributed as a co-author of one of the papers within the issue. The article in question, “Challenges and opportunities in restoring European free-flowing rivers”, examines this sub-group of wetland habitats and the approaches to safeguarding its critical role in the environmental, economic and social realities of Europe. To that end, its authors undertake an extensive review of how free-flowing rivers (FFRs) are defined in terms of their biodiversity makeup, restoration and the challenges they face.
Moreover, the paper dives into the temporal and spatial perspectives that should be harnessed in the assessment of the conditions defining FFRs across the Old Continent, all in pursuit of greater resilience against ecological degradation and climate change. This culminates in an examination of prospects and hurdles on the path towards effectively implementing policies such as the Nature Restoration Regulation (NRR) and the 2030 EU Biodiversity Strategy in the context of FFR ecosystems.
BioAgora specifically is singled out in this context for its development of the Science Service for Biodiversity (SSBD), a mechanism for ensuring evidence-based decision-making in the EU via a dialogue between researchers and policy actors. As laid out by the article, this effort includes the consolidation of a dedicated Knowledge Exchange Network on freshwater biodiversity for the management of responses to requests for, among others, expert input on the governance of FFR restoration.
The full article can be accessed here, while the comprehensive library of BioAgora publications is available on this page.