Freshwater Wetlands: Balancing Food and Water Security with Resilience of Ecological and Social Systems.

Wetlands play a vital role as landscape elements, providing ecological, biogeochemical, and hydrological benefits as well as socioeconomic, food, and freshwater security. Large-scale alterations to landscapes and the hydrologic cycle to meet demands of growing increasingly affluent populations have left wetlands impaired. Typically viewed as single units, we conceptualize wetlands as hydrologically and ecologically connected self-organized, dynamic, complex networks. Wetland networks and their many functions are linked to produce persistent self-emergent patterns and landscape resilience. Through this viewpoint, wetland restoration and recreation efforts can move toward optimization strategies that preserve landscape resilience while promoting socioeconomic, food, and freshwater water security.