Photo by Tomasz Pezold
Tb eNEWS - 11 - October 2017 - newsletter cover
Tb eNEWS - 11 - October 2017

IN FOCUS: Saxon-Bohemian Switzerland in the heart of Europe

A conservation atlas for transboundary conservation areas

Restoration of the Rio Bravo-Grande


News
01.12.2018.
Cross-border Challenges and Community Resilience
Implementation of the CRESSIDA project by the Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern Europe
A Visual Stream Assessment in Serbia, July 2017
A Visual Stream Assessment in Serbia, July 2017

Following the 2014 Southeast Europe floods, which displaced millions of people and caused over 5 billion USD in damages, the Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern Europe implemented the CRESSIDA project with support from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The CRESSIDA project provided a theoretical framework for integrating sustainable development into policy making and water management at the local level in order to enable better transboundary watershed management. 

The project adapted the Index of Watershed Integrity (IWI), a tool used by the EPA to map risk factors that have been explicitly shown to interfere with and degrade key functions (e.g., sediment regulation, habitat provisioning) of watersheds, for the transboundary region between Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo*, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia. After combining over 20 geospatial datasets of stressors (e.g., pesticide use, reservoirs, mines), the IWI first quantified the local stress and then the up-stream stress. 

At the concluding annual meetings in 2018, the 18 participating communities individually reviewed the local stress mapped on their community pages (see below for an example: Bogatić). Then the participants came together to discuss the regional maps of the up-stream stress and their shared benefits (e.g., attenuation) and risks (e.g., downstream flow of stressors). To support future transboundary watershed planning, a working group was established to transfer knowledge on watershed science, data acquisition, R and Python scripting, and mapping with ESRI and QGIS. 

CRESSIDA project overview: http://documents.rec.org/publications/CressidaLeafletWeb.pdf

Community Videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXb3CT9WQkI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r88hOSwomnU

 Kelsey Aho

ahokelsey@gmail.com