Simone Langhans

Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow, Dr. sc. ETH Zurich (Switzerland)

Picture1“I am a freshwater ecologist with extenisve experience and great enthusiasm in aquatic ecology, river restoration, decision support theory and conservation planning. In my research I combine these topics to, often in multi-disciplinary teams, investigate alternative ways of solving complex environmental decision problems with a focus on freshwater management.”

Simone Langhans is a Marie-Curie Fellow currently based at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. She will join the Basque Centre for Climate Change in 2019 for the final year of her fellowship. Currently, she is also affiliated with the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries in Berlin, Germany.Dr. Langhans holds a Diploma in Natural Sciences, a MSc in Advanded Studies in Secondary and Higher Education, and a Doctor of Sciences from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH), Switzerland. Throughout her academic career, Dr. Langhans has constantly broadened her expertise by joining research groups around the world, working in Switzerland, Italy, Australia, Germany and New Zealand. Besides academia, Dr. Langhans has experience working within government settings, having led the Swiss-wide development of river quality assessments for a few years after her PhD.

Curriculum Vitae:
CV_Langhans_Dec2018

Alexander von Humboldt Network:

https://www.humboldt-foundation.de/pls/web/pub_hn_query.bibliographia_details?p_externe_id=7000272317&p_lang=en

Google scholar link:

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=yKkZo6YAAAAJ&hl=en

Twitter link:

https://twitter.com/sdlanghans?lang=en;

Twitter handle: @sdlanghans

Researchgate:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Simone_Langhans

Catchments Otago Link:

http://www.catchmentsotago.org/

Song by Knut’s Koffer about my research on river restoration optimization:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MJkQOao_dw

AQUACROSS project

Duration: June 2015 – November 2018
Project description: AQUACROSS is a Horizon 2020 project which aims to support EU efforts to protect aquatic biodiversity and ensure the provision of aquatic ecosystem services. As such, AQUACROSS seeks to advance knowledge and application of ecosystem-based management (EBM) for aquatic ecosystems to support the timely achievement of the EU 2020 Biodiversity Strategy targets.
Aquatic ecosystems are rich in biodiversity and home to a diverse array of species and habitats, providing numerous economic and societal benefits to Europe. Many of these valuable ecosystems are at risk of being irreversibly damaged by human activities and pressures, including pollution, contamination, invasive species, overfishing and climate change. These pressures threaten the sustainability of these ecosystems, their provision of ecosystem services and ultimately human well-being.

Existing EU policies have been unable to halt and reverse the trend of declining biodiversity of aquatic ecosystems. The current broad policy landscape such as the Water Framework Directive and Marine Strategy Framework Directive means that sustainable management solutions require coordination and cooperation between different policy areas spanning freshwater, coastal and marine ecosystems, in addition to innovative business solutions and public-private engagement.

About AQUACROSS:

https://aquacross.eu/content/dr-simone-langhans

https://aquacross.eu/content/about-aquacross

SABER CULTURAL project

Duration: January 2018 – December 2020
SAfeguarding Biodiversity and Ecosystem seRvices by integrating CULTURAL values in freshwater management: learning from Maori
Freshwater ecosystems are essential to people´s economic, cultural and social wellbeing, yet are still one of the most seriously threatened ecosystems on the planet. This conflict is reflected in political regulations that ask to halt the loss of, restore and safeguard freshwaters, their biodiversity and the ecosystem services they provide. Ecosystem-Based Management (EBM), a holistic approach advocated to help doing so, involves an overarching regulatory framework and local solutions with trade-offs and compromises – factors that make decision processes complex and easily co-opted.
In SABER CULTURAL, I use a well-known participatory decision support framework (MCA) to tackle two major challenges in freshwater EBM: 1) including cultural values that build a conceptual link between natural resources/biodiversity and local knowledge, besides traditionally considered ecological and socio-economic ones, and 2) accounting for uncertainty. MCA is selected because it is i) transparent, ii) allows for the whole range of stakeholder values to be quantified and accounted for, iii) can be used to robustly test outcomes of different management scenarios, and iv) can ultimately be used to prioritise cost-effective management actions with collective buy in. To forecast ecosystem services flow under different management alternatives, MCA is coupled with a novel modelling approach (ARIES). We test the MCA-ARIES framework in New Zealand, where cultural indigenous values play a prominent role in freshwater management, and transfer the flow models to the river basin scale to inform existing management plans and policies in Europe.

SABER CULTURAL receives funding from the Horiozon 2020 – the Framework Programme for Research and Innovation – European Commission. Grant Agreement number 748625.