An online platform for exploring the climate change impact on ecosystems and wetland restoration potential in the Danube River Basin

Climate change impact studies often use large and complex climate scenario datasets. However, these datasets are not always easily accessible or usable, especially for non-specialist users. To address address this challenge,  the Restore4Life wetland Restoration Decision Support System was developed as an online interactive platform enabling users to easily explore and visualize climate change scenarios based on CMIP6 simulations over the Danube River Basin. The platform integrates bias-corrected climate projections based on simulations from eight global climate models and an ensemble approach is applied, using the median as the central estimate and the 10th and 90th percentiles to represent model uncertainty. Users can interactively explore spatial patterns, temporal horizons, variables, and scenarios through a web-based interface, supporting both scientific analysis and climate services applications. The platform provides climate change signals for air temperature and precipitation, and several related extreme indices. Four Shared Socioeconomic Pathways are included: SSP1, SSP2, SSP3, and SSP5, covering a wide range of possible future developments.

To ensure transparency, reproducibility, and long-term accessibility, all processed datasets used on the platform are published in a standardized format and openly available through the Zenodo repository, with persistent identifiers. A key feature of the application is the interactive spatial analysis capability. The application allows analysis for several predefined areas of interest, including vulnerable ecosystems. In addition, users can draw their own areas of interest directly on the map. This enables location-specific analyses adapted to different user needs. The platform was developed using the Shiny framework and is deployed on a state-of-the-art IT infrastructure. Beyond the interactive web interface, this infrastructure provides programmatic access to all underlying datasets through standardized, cloud-optimized protocols and formats, including OGC WMS/WCS, OGC API services, STAC, Zarr, Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF (COG) and GeoParquet.

Acknowledgment 

This research was funded by the "RestoreForLife (Restoration of wetland complexes as life supporting systems in the Danube Basin)" project, under the European Union’s Horizon Europe Programme (Grant agreement No. 101112736).