Environmental policy and management to regulate multiple human activities require detailed understanding of how activities act individually and in combination to affect ecosystems and the range of services they provide.

Land2Sea is a project funded under the Belmont-Biodiversa programme which aims to (a) develop an integrative framework of coupled models for predicting the immediate and long term consequences of land-use and climate change for the delivery of ecosystem services and the underlying biodiversity and ecosystem processes in freshwater and marine ecosystems and (b) co-design a mechanism for the application of the framework to environmental policy and practise.

The project brings together a multidisciplinary team from Ireland, Germany, Sweden, Canada and the USA. It will focus on combined impacts on freshwater and marine systems of selected human inputs to terrestrial systems (nutrients, biocides) and future climate-induced changes to hydromorphology. Empirical research will characterise combined effects of these stressors on multiple dimensions of biodiversity and on ecosystem processes, services and benefits. Findings will fill gaps in existing knowledge, which will be reviewed and complemented by expert opinion as a basis for a framework of coupled models (physical, biological and socio-economic) to predict impacts aquatic ecosystems and ecosystem services. The framework and its application to policy and management will be developed and trialed through four case study catchments with differing environmental and societal contexts and strong backgrounds of research and dependence on freshwater and marine ecosystems: Dublin Bay, Ireland, the St Lawrence Estuary, Canada, Bohuslän, Sweden and the German part of the Wadden Sea.