The joint Irish-German project aims to develop an evidence-based and interactive decision support tool for managing Ireland’s freshwater ecosystem services. The project’s focus will be on regulating ecosystem services such as water and nutrient retention, which are then demonstrated by means of a case study including three Irish rivers. The decision support tool will be based upon probabilistic Bayesian Networks (BNs) that link pressures and stressors of freshwater ecosystem health with biological responses and ultimately with the functions and ecosystem services related to the biological responses.

The BNs further allow to integrate the expert’s knowledge and literature-based evidence of certain cause-effect relationships, to model the response of ecosystem services to related management options targeting in particular the improvement of regulating ecosystem services. Eventually, the translation of ecosystem services and their changes into monetary and non-monetary values will enable the estimation of socio-economic implications of freshwater ecosystem management.

The project is coordinated by the University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland and is funded by the Irish Environmental Protection Agency.