Search

The widespread salinisation of freshwater ecosystems poses a major threat to the biodiversity, functioning, and services that they provide. Human activities promote freshwater salinisation through multiple drivers (e.g., agriculture, resource extraction, urbanisation) that are amplified by climate change. Due to its complexity, we are still far from fully understanding the ecological and evolutionary consequences of freshwater salinisation. Here, we assess current research gaps and present a research agenda to guide future studies. We identified different gaps in taxonomic groups, levels of biological organisation, and geographic regions. We suggest focusing on global- and landscape-scale processes, functional approaches, genetic and molecular levels, and ecoevolutionary dynamics as key future avenues to predict the consequences of freshwater salinisation for ecosystems and human societies. This work is part of the AQUACOSM and AQUACOSM-plus projects that have received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement Nos 731065 and 871081. D.C.M., M.B., E.J., R.P., S.A.B., M.G., Z.H., S.L., J.C.N., M.R., and C.F.V. were supported by the H2020 EU-funded project AQUACOSM-plus (no. 871081). D.C.M., M.B., S.A.B., and J.C.N. were supported by the H2020 EU-funded project AQUACOSM (no. 731065). M.B. and E.J. were supported by the TÜBITAK program BIDEB2232 (project 118C250). M.B. and S.B. were supported by the H2020 EU-funded project PONDERFUL (no. 869296). Z.H. and C.F.V. were supported by the NKFIH-471-3/2021 project. Z.H. was supported by the János Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. P.U-C. was supported by the Swedish Research Council Formas (grant: 2020-01825). M.M. was supported by the Grant RyC2016-19348 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by ESF ‘Investing in your future’