Monitoring and assessment of environmental impacts of droughts: literature synthesis

The objective of this report is to present a brief synthesis of a targeted literature review aimed at highlighting the long and short term ecological impacts of drought by answering the following key questions: 1. What impacts do droughts have on ecosystems (including differentiating the impacts of winter (including flushing flows) and summer droughts)? 2. Depending on the severity of the drought, how quickly do aquatic ecosystems (including rivers, lakes, wetlands and ponds) recover? 3. Can we incorporate any impacts resulting from climate change into our understanding and conceptual models? 4. What are the long term ecological impacts (if any) and can we define the threshold(s) beyond which rivers, lakes, wetlands and ponds are “permanently” altered and deliver reduced ecosystem services? 5. Are we and/or our partners collecting the right information to answer these questions?