H2020ReSET: Monitoring and modelling the hydrological impact of ecosystem restoration scenarios at scales from local to continental using FreeStation and WaterWorld

ReSET (Restarting Economy in Support of Environment, through Technology) is an EC H2020 research and development project focused on future and emerging technologies (FET) in Environmental Intelligence (EI). EI brings together multiple data streams, employing human reasoning and machine learning to better understand and manage the environment.

As part of ReSET, we are developing and deploying distributed networks of in-field sensors to monitor the hydrological impact of natural flood management, regenerative farming and other ecosystem restoration.  These sensor networks use FreeStation.org, low-cost, internet connected environmental sensing and data logging to provide locally specific evidence for the hydrological impact of a range of restoration investments in different locations and at different scales. More than 100 data loggers  have been deployed for 18 months collecting data every 10 minutes. 

This provides both capacity to directly analyse the effectiveness of investments in water ecosystem services  and co-benefits for non water ecosystem services and helps develop the understanding to better parameterise these restoration investments in spatial models like WaterWorld.  We apply  the WaterWorld Policy Support System  to assess the hydrological impact of novel scenarios for ecosystem restoration at the national and European scale. 

As well as ecosystem restoration, a  key  focus is regenerative agriculture (RA) which is a land management technique that involves no or low tillage, the use of cover crops and diverse crop rotations to help restore soil structure to a more natural state, encouraging infiltration and reducing runoff generation. This management technique has the potential to increase the water storage capacity of the soil, thereby reducing downstream runoff generation and flood risk..

Our local scale monitoring indicates that restoration of Eurasian Beaver habitat and of farmed soil through reduced tillage have the potential to increase flood storage locally and can reduce flood risk at downstream assets if applied at scale. Our national and continental scale modelling indicates that soil and canopy stores are critical to natural flood management since water body and wetland stores have only local influence and floodplain stores often contain important assets that preclude the use of the floodplain.  Ecosystem restoration has the potential to regenerate Europe's waters, but significant effort will be required to reach the level of restoration that will be needed