Industrialized Riverine Landscapes - How extremes, infrastructure and resource demands transform socio-ecohydrological systems

The world's rivers are shaped by social and natural processes and how they interact. As Industrialised Riverine Landscapes (IRLs), they have become part of our critical infrastructure, crucial for the water-food-energy nexus, but also vulnerable to extreme events and biodiversity loss in the wake of global change. This situation poses major challenges for the management of river landscapes and urgently requires an interdisciplinary approach that integrates natural, social and engineering sciences to analyse the causes and trajectories of river system change in the past and present and to support their sustainable transformation in the future through basic research. The new doctoral programme IRL builds on the research framework of the doctoral school HR21 (hr21.boku.ac.at) and is based on the common conceptual foundation of coupled socio-ecohydrological systems (SEHS). IRL aims at a better understanding of sustainable transformation processes in river systems, therefore our research focuses on changes in social, ecological and hydrological systems and their coupling. IRL doctoral projects identify the causes of change outside and inside SEHS, analyse this change and develop possible future scenarios. Research into rivers as SEHS provides new insights into the co-evolution of nature and society as an essential natural resource for human society, a valuable habitat and a critical place on the way to a more sustainable future. IRL is organised in four research clusters addressing key system variables in current river and sustainability science: (1) Connectivity, (2) Governance and Planning, (3) Metabolism and (4) Vulnerability. The interdisciplinary work combines the research of faculty members and doctoral students. Three research fields represent pressing current challenges in riverine landscapes form the thematic focus: (1) extreme events, (2) infrastructure and urbanisation and (3) the water-food-energy nexus. PhD projects combine disciplinary expertise and methodology with the integrative perspective and support of an interdisciplinary group of 15 leading experts from the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna (BOKU). The doctoral programme IRL promotes innovative, collaborative research in SEHS, trains a new generation of scientists, managers and engineers for river systems and strengthens BOKU's position in the field of water research, sustainable natural resource management and as an international hub for research and education on riverine landscapes.