The potential of ecosystem-based management to integrate biodiversity conservation and ecosystem service provision in aquatic ecosystems

Global aquatic biodiversity keeps declining rapidly, despite international efforts providing a variety of policies and legislations that identify goals for, and give directions to protecting the world's aquatic fauna and flora. With the H2020 project AQUACROSS, we have made an unprecedented effort to unify policy strategies, knowledge, and management concepts of freshwater, coastal, and marine ecosystems to support the achievement of the targets set by the EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2020. AQUACROSS has embraced the concept of ecosystem-based management (EBM), which approaches environmental management from a social-ecological system perspective to protect biodiversity and to sustainably harvest ecosystem services. This special issue includes contributions resulting from AQUACROSS, which either tackle selected EBM challenges from a theoretical point of view or apply EBM in one of the selected case studies across Europe. In this article, we introduce relevant topics, address the most important lessons learnt, and suggest where research should go with aquatic EBM. We hope that this special issue will foster and facilitate the uptake of EBM in aquatic ecosystems and, therewith, provide the on-ground applications needed for evaluating EBM's utility to safeguard aquatic biodiversity. © 2019 With this special issue we advance and, therewith, foster the understanding and application of EBM in aquatic ecosystems by showcasing selected results of AQUACROSS – an EU-funded Horizon 2020 project ( Lago et al., 2019 ). Finished in November 2018, AQUACROSS aimed to support EU efforts to enhance the resilience of aquatic ecosystems, managed as a continuum, and to stop the loss of aquatic biodiversity in line with the EU2020 Biodiversity Strategy as well as to ensure the ongoing provision of ESs. Hence, AQUACROSS provided the perfect opportunity to advance the knowledge base and demonstrate practical applications of the EBM concept across a range of European case studies.