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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Water
Sec. Water and Human Systems
Volume 6 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/frwa.2024.1386925
This article is part of the Research Topic Understanding Water - Energy - Food - Ecosystem Nexus: from modelling to action View all 3 articles

Optimizing the Water-Ecosystem-Food Nexus using Nature-Based Solutions at the basin scale

Provisionally accepted
Antonia Maragkaki Antonia Maragkaki Evangelia A. Koukianaki Evangelia A. Koukianaki Maria A. Lilli Maria A. Lilli *Dionissis Efstathiou Dionissis Efstathiou Nikolaos P. Nikolaidis Nikolaos P. Nikolaidis
  • Technical University of Crete, Chania, Greece

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The Water Ecosystem Food (WEF) Nexus duly acknowledges the complex interdependencies among water, ecosystems, and food production, underscoring Nature Based Solutions (NBS) as an efficacious strategy for navigating these interconnections. In this research, four different NBS (terraces, riparian forest, livestock management and agro ecological practices) were assessed in terms of their impact to WEF Nexus. The Karst-SWAT and the one-dimensional Integrated Critical Zone (1D-ICZ) models were used to simulate the impact of NBS on water quantity and quality as well as on soil ecosystem services of Koiliaris River Basin, which serves as an illustrative example of a basin that has experienced severe soil and biodiversity degradation. The Karst-SWAT model showed that a combination of NBS of terraces and riparian forest can reduce soil erosion and the sediment load by 97%. The 1D-ICZ model successfully simulated the soil-plant-water system and showed that agro ecological practices affect biomass production, carbon and nutrient sequestration, soil structure and geochemistry.

    Keywords: ecosystem services, hydrological modeling, Geochemical modeling, land management, Soil ecosystem functions, soil threats

    Received: 16 Feb 2024; Accepted: 27 Mar 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Maragkaki, Koukianaki, Lilli, Efstathiou and Nikolaidis. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Maria A. Lilli, Technical University of Crete, Chania, 73132, Greece

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