Deliverable 1.1 - SMART Indicators for Quantifying Wetland Resilience and Services

To mitigate impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss, The European Commission proposal for Nature restoration law (European Commission, 2022) - a central element of European Biodiversity Strategy (European Commission, 2021) - is setting ecosystem specific restoration targets for every member state.

To properly fulfil these targets and to avoid mismanagement, we need to gather existing knowledge across Europe to develop more effective restoration plans, tools, and guidelines for practitioners.

An elementary part is to develop effective indicators to measure and monitor restoration success, to be used in assessing if the chosen restoration methods are adequate. These indicators should be SMART, i.e., specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound (Doran 1981).

SMART indicators of wetland resilience and ecosystem service provisioning can be used for assessing and monitoring 1) wetland functioning and service provisioning following restoration that allows assessing the success of restoration and 2) the baseline data for defining the safe operating space for wetland ecosystems that allows for the understanding of how (beneficial) ecosystem services will change under pressure of climate change.