freshwater-ecosystem-stressors-utac

GenesisAeon Package 106 — freshwater ecosystem stressors under deglacierization. The ecological bridge between the physical series (P99–P102) and the resilience/governance series (P103–P104): what is actually happening to the rivers and lakes that all of this ultimately affects. Deliberately has no UTAC/CREP/AFET bridge — see DISCLAIMER.md.

For a plain-language explanation of the same topic (German, no jargon, written for general audiences), see WHITEPAPER.md.

What this is, and what it deliberately excludes

Built on durable, citable science only: real WWF/Ramsar statistics and a real, peer-reviewed case study (the 2022 Oder/Odra disaster).

It deliberately excludes time-bound "current conditions" — a specific river-level reading, a specific seasonal (e.g. El Niño) forecast — from its data. Those are real and newsworthy in the moment, but a versioned science package isn't the right place for a news-cycle snapshot: it would be stale within months, unlike the peer-reviewed literature the rest of this ecosystem cites. If you need current conditions, check a live hydrological monitoring source instead.

What's real here

• WWF Living Planet Report (2022) — freshwater vertebrate populations declined 83% on average since 1970 (vs. 69% across all monitored vertebrate biomes — freshwater is the steepest decline of any habitat type), worst in Latin America/Caribbean (94%). This is a population-size index, not an extinction count — see is_population_decline_not_extinction().
• Ramsar Global Wetland Outlook (2018) — wetlands are disappearing 3x faster than forests globally, 35% lost 1970–2015, with loss accelerating (not just continuing) since 2000. Directly relevant to P103: wetlands are one of the real components of a distributed buffer portfolio, and they're vanishing fastest of all.
• The 2022 Oder/Odra River disaster (Sobieraj & Metelski 2023) — a real, mechanistic multi-stressor case study: elevated salinity (industrial/mining discharge) + high solar radiation + low water discharge (drought) combined to trigger a toxic Prymnesium parvum bloom. Outcome: ~50% fish population decline in the affected stretch, ~1,000 tonnes of fish/mussels/snails killed. Not a natural disaster — the bloom would not have reached this scale without the human-caused salinity increase. is_natural_disaster() returns False.

Quickstart

pip install freshwater-ecosystem-stressors-utac

from freshwater_ecosystem_stressors_utac import (
    freshwater_vertebrate_decline_pct,
    overall_vertebrate_decline_pct,
    loss_rate_vs_forest_multiplier,
    ODER_2022,
    is_natural_disaster,
    requires_all_three_conditions,
)

print(freshwater_vertebrate_decline_pct())   # 83.0
print(overall_vertebrate_decline_pct())      # 69.0
print(loss_rate_vs_forest_multiplier())      # 3.0
print(ODER_2022.fish_population_decline_pct) # 50.0
print(is_natural_disaster(ODER_2022))        # False
print(requires_all_three_conditions())

Development

pip install -e ".[dev]"
pre-commit install
ruff check src tests
mypy src
pytest

Citation

See CITATION.cff and .zenodo.json.