Compound Stressors and Forward-Looking Restoration of Freshwater Habitats

Freshwater ecosystems face escalating degradation driven by the convergence of climate extremes, land-use intensification, and emerging pollutants. These stressors interact in complex ways, amplifying impacts on ecosystem structure, function, and resilience. Climate extremes, including inland flooding and drought, are becoming more frequent and severe, altering flow regimes, mobilizing pollutants, and reshaping habitat structure across river and wetland systems. Conventional restoration approaches that aim to recover historical conditions are no longer sufficient in an era of shifting baselines and non-stationary climate dynamics. A more adaptive understanding of how compound stressors interact is needed to guide freshwater management and restoration under increasingly uncertain environmental conditions.

This Research Topic aims to reframe freshwater restoration as a forward-looking and adaptive process focused on sustaining ecological functions under uncertain futures, rather than recovering historical baselines. It addresses interactions among compound stressors, particularly climate extremes such as inland flooding and drought, land-use intensification, and pollutant mixtures, which are difficult to capture with conventional single-stressor approaches. Recent advances in scenario-based planning, predictive modelling, early warning monitoring, and adaptive governance offer new tools for tackling this problem. The Topic welcomes interdisciplinary contributions integrating ecology, hydrology, environmental chemistry, modelling, and governance to diagnose degradation, develop adaptive restoration frameworks, and reimagine resilience in the face of accelerating global change.

We welcome Original Research, Reviews, and Perspective articles addressing: diagnosis of compound stressor impacts on freshwater ecosystem structure and function; interactions among pollutants, other water-quality stressors, and climate extremes such as floods and droughts, including emerging contaminants such as pharmaceuticals, PFAS, microplastics, and nanomaterials; adaptive, resilient restoration strategies and evaluation of restoration effectiveness under multiple stressors, including approaches supported by scenario-based planning and risk assessment; early-warning indicators and continuous monitoring tools (eDNA, autonomous sensors, remote sensing); governance and social-ecological dimensions, including stakeholder co-design and Indigenous knowledge; trade-offs and policy pathways for financing restoration at scale; and coupled hydrological-ecological-social modelling and cross-system meta-syntheses. Case studies, empirical field and experimental studies, conceptual and methodological advances, and synthesis papers across freshwater systems, climates, and land uses are all encouraged.
This Research Topic aims to reframe freshwater restoration as a forward-looking and adaptive process focused on sustaining ecological functions under uncertain futures, rather than recovering historical baselines. It addresses the problem of compound stressor interactions, particularly between climate extremes such as inland flooding, land-use intensification, and pollutant mixtures, which conventional single-stressor approaches fail to capture. Recent advances in scenario-based planning, predictive modelling, early-warning monitoring, and adaptive governance offer new tools for tackling this problem. The Topic welcomes interdisciplinary contributions integrating ecology, hydrology, environmental chemistry, modelling, and governance to diagnose degradation, develop adaptive restoration frameworks, and reimagine resilience in the face of accelerating global change, with particular interest in the impacts of inland flooding on freshwater habitats.

We welcome Original Research, Reviews, and Perspective articles addressing: diagnosis of compound stressor impacts on freshwater habitat structure and function, with particular interest in inland flooding; interactions between emerging pollutants (pharmaceuticals, PFAS, microplastics, nanomaterials) and climate extremes such as floods and droughts; adaptive, resilient restoration strategies supported by scenario-based planning and risk assessment; early-warning indicators and continuous monitoring tools (eDNA, autonomous sensors, remote sensing); governance and social-ecological dimensions, including stakeholder co-design and Indigenous knowledge; trade-offs and policy pathways for financing restoration at scale; and coupled hydrological-ecological-social modelling and cross-system meta-syntheses. Case studies, empirical field and experimental studies, and synthesis papers across freshwater systems, climates, and land uses are all encouraged.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Classification
• Clinical Trial
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Classification
• Clinical Trial
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: Freshwater Restoration, Climate Extremes, Emerging Pollutants, Adaptive Resilience and Adaptation, Socio-ecological Governance, Ecosystem Monitoring and Assessment, Integrated Water Governance, Hydrological-Ecological Modelling, Flood

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.