Water Quality, Ecological Health and Ecosystem Restoration

Dear Colleagues,

Worldwide, various governments and environmental protection agencies have set the priority of eliminating water pollution and restoring aquatic ecosystems and biodiversity. Organic pollution (e.g., pharmaceuticals, pesticides, excess nutrients) and microplastics, in particular, continue to degrade marine and freshwater systems, threatening human, animal and environmental health. Several recovery and restoration actions are already taking place in such ecosystems. While good water quality is vital for the conservation, recovery or restoration of aquatic systems, its diagnosis and monitoring are very often still viewed as a physical recuperation of the water parameters and the aquatic system (e.g., physicochemical parameters, flow variation, sediment size and movement, river morphology). Little focus is put on diagnosing the ecological status and biodiversity. Moreover, many of the ongoing ecosystem recuperation actions lack objective monitoring and assessment to evaluate the level of recovery or restoration and the rates at which they occur. Their success remains mostly unclear, delaying and limiting the improvement of future interventions of the measures taken. Important questions are in urgent need to be addressed, such as which strategies of water quality treatments and ecosystem recovery approaches are proving more successful; the extent of recovery reached; the rate at which the ecosystem recovers; the benefits of restoration versus passive recovery; species reintroduction or translocation; suitable early warning indicators of successful recovery/restoration. This Special Issue is open to innovative contributions related to integrated biomonitoring of water quality, multi-pressure and multi-compartment approaches to the diagnosis of ecological health and ecosystem recovery/restoration. We invite the submission of review or research articles on such topics related to the assessment and sustainability of freshwater and marine ecosystems, especially about multidisciplinary approaches within the One Health triad.

Dr. Luís Oliva-Teles
Dr. António Paulo Carvalho
Guest Editors

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