Funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, coordinated by IGB Berlin
Duration: March 2019 to February 2022

The AQUATAG project is the first to quantify recreation along freshwaters in Germany at large spatial scales to assess its effect on the ecological status of these ecosystems. Widespread recre-ational activities along rivers and lakes like swimming, angling, hiking or canoeing can potentially strongly affect the ecological status. The University of Duisburg-Essen is mainly involved in the work to assess the effects of pressures resulting from recreation as a driver sensu the EU-Water Framework Directive.

Besides affecting the ecological status of rivers and lakes, many recreational activities depend on the naturalness of these ecosystems, and hence are affected by other drivers like urbanization and agriculture similar to the ecological status.

In a second part of the project, recreation is therefore rather considered as a response variable together with the ecological status depend-ing on the same drivers and pressures. The objective is to identify synergies and trade-offs be-tween recreation and ecological status. For example, compared to urbanized and polluted riv-ers, natural reaches are more attractive for canoeing and in a better ecological status, while the usual casual canoeing also requires some degree of human intervention to keep it safe and doa-ble for less experienced people. First empirical studies indicate that rivers in a moderate eco-logical status are most attractive for recreation but large-scale studies allowing to derive more general management recommendations are missing yet.

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