The overarching goal of the ABRESO project (Abandonment and rebound: Societal views on landscape and land-use change and their impacts on water and soils) is to develop a global transdisciplinary platform; envisioned as a network of people, sites, tools, and ideas, for understanding the impacts of land abandonment on sustainability of soil and water resources. Land abandonment and subsequent land use or land cover change can have profound implications for water resources, as the changing fabric of the Critical Zone (CZ) dictates changes in infiltration, runoff, and the delivery of sediment and nitrogen to groundwater and surface waters. Changing climate, changing demographics, and changing human needs and perceptions are all potential drivers of land abandonment. We meld the natural and social sciences to address the evolution of soil and water resources in response to these drivers, using advanced techniques (concentration-discharge relations; multi-level modeling of stakeholder perceptions and preferences) in order to understand the ways in which the biophysical and societal landscapes are linked to water resources and environmental decision making.

The general theme of this project is to determine actual and perceived effects of land use transitions on CZ function in the context of land abandonment. Management and social-cultural changes create transitions, altering watershed properties (soil and water quality, and related ecosystem services) in a manner that stakeholders may not understand or appreciate. Yet changes affect stakeholders, what they want to preserve or change, and their views of land management strategies.
The project team is diverse and highly accomplished, ranging from an environmental psychologist to an isotope geochemist to a landscape ecologist. Together the project leaders have selected 25 geographically diverse watersheds from 5 culturally diverse countries with broad variation in climate, geology, watershed size, human density, drivers of land use and management, and stakeholders (Figure 2). Our study regions include sites in France, Italy, Japan, Taiwan, and the USA, with research catchments that are large enough to incorporate a mosaic of land uses and management approaches including abandonment and redevelopment, while small enough to allow detailed assessment of biophysical conditions in different watersheds and regional variation in stakeholder views. Most of our study watersheds already have extensive biophysical data to characterize the CZ, with data sets spanning decades.