Riverine floods cause increasingly severe damages to human settlements and infrastructure. Ecosystems have a natural capacity to decrease both severity and frequency of floods. Natural flood regulation processes along freshwaters can be attributed to two different mechanisms: flood prevention that takes place in the whole catchment and flood mitigation once the water has accumulated in the stream. These flood regulating mechanisms are not consistently recognized in major ecosystem service (ES) classifications. For a balanced landscape management, it is important to assess the ES flood regulation so that it can account for the different processes at the relevant sites. We reviewed literature, classified them according to these mechanisms, and analysed the influencing ecosystem characteristics. For prevention, vegetation biomass and forest extent were predominant, while for mitigation, the available space for water was decisive. We add some aspects on assessing flood regulation as ES, and suggest also to include flood hazard into calculations.

Charting the long-term trends in European wheat and maize yields and harvested areas and the relation of yields to climatic and economic drivers, two profound spatial processes become apparent. One consequence of the relatively late modernization of Eastern Europe has been to shift the focus of grain production from West to East. The warming trend prevailing over the past decades in the summer and winter seasons has been accompanied by a South to North shift in the harvested areas. The combination of these two processes has meant that the north-eastern sector of the European grain chessboard has emerged as the main beneficiary. There, the relatively low sensitivity of cereals to climatic change plus high economic growth rates have been accompanied by the most dynamic increases in cereal yields on the continent. As a result, a modern version of the 3000 year-old grain distribution system of the Ancient World is being restored before our eyes. One noteworthy finding is that increasing January–March temperatures have had a significant positive impact on wheat yields from Northern to South-Eastern Europe, and this is, at least in part, compensating for the negative impact of summer warming.

The contamination of waters with nutrients, especially nitrogen and phosphorus originating from various diffuse and point sources, has become a worldwide issue in recent decades. Due to the complexity of the processes involved, watershed models are gaining an increasing role in their analysis. The goal set by the EU Water Framework Directive (to reach “good status” of all water bodies) requires spatially detailed information on the fate of contaminants. In this study, the watershed nutrient model MONERIS was applied to the Hungarian part of the Danube River Basin. The spatial resolution was 1078 water bodies (mean area of 86 km2); two subsequent 4 year periods (2009–2012 and 2013–2016) were modeled. Various elements/parameters of the model were adjusted and tested against surface and subsurface water quality measurements conducted all over the country, namely (i) the water balance equations (surface and subsurface runoff), (ii) the nitrogen retention parameters of the subsurface pathways (excluding tile drainage), (iii) the shallow groundwater phosphorus concentrations, and (iv) the surface water retention parameters. The study revealed that (i) digital-filter-based separation of surface and subsurface runoff yielded different values of these components, but this change did not influence nutrient loads significantly; (ii) shallow groundwater phosphorus concentrations in the sandy soils of Hungary differ from those of the MONERIS default values; (iii) a significant change of the phosphorus in-stream retention parameters was needed to approach measured in-stream phosphorus load values. Local emissions and pathways were analyzed and compared with previous model results.

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During the 20th century in the Hungarian lowlands the emphasis was put on maximizing provisioning ecosystem services (ES), which caused the weakening of regulating and other services. With the growing environmental pressures, it is crucial to apply a more adaptive landscape management. This, however, leads to territorial conflicts, as large areas with water-tolerant land cover (i.e., wetlands, meadows, riparian forests) are needed to buffer extreme hydrological events.We present some findings of the WateRisk project, a research that focused on the possible solutions of these conflicts. In a scenario-based case study, we analyze the outlined issue for the Szamos-Kraszna Interfluve, a 510 km2 lowland catchment heavily affected by excess water. Scenarios were evaluated with an integrated methodology that focuses on the water budget and the total values of ES. The efficiency of the drainage network was found to be minor/moderate as it provided only -1–5% reduction in the spatial extents of inundations, and it contributed only ~20% to the elimination of water coverage. Furthermore, comparing the present (defense-focused) and the alternative (water retention focused) scenarios, the latter turned out to provide higher monetary value for the summed individual and social benefits of ES. This underlines the need for extensive adaptive measures in both water management and landscape planning to create resilience and the ability to cope with contemporary environmental challenges.