Integrative approaches to assess holistic ecosystem reactions to environmental threats and perturbations - an ecohydrological perspective

The ongoing Climate Crisis significantly deflects ecosystems worldwide and threatens their sustainable functioning. Hydrologically, we face an increase in extreme hydrological events, increasing the importance of a comprehensive knowledge of the ecosystem water cycle to assess ecosystem stability in forest and other ecosystems. At the same time, water cycling is intertwined with carbon and nutrient cycling and system responses to environmental stress being regulated by a complicated feedback loop of e.g. environmental factors, ecosystem structure, geomorphology, or species adaptation strategies. Hence, to achieve a holistic understanding of (eco-)hydrological processes and their responses to Climate and anthropogenic threats – and more importantly their role in overall ecosystem sustainability -  we need to develop cross-discinplinary, cross-scale experimental designs and platforms. Here, we present multiple examples on linking structural and functional ecosystem responses to threats, feedbacks between water and nutrient and/or carbon cycling with a focus on how novel interdisciplinary sensor platforms are ideal tools to improve our process understanding, by harnessing scientific and technical advances in several disciplines including in-situ stable isotope techniques, flux measurements, machine learning, or remote sensing.