Editorial: Towards the Sustainable Use of African Wetlands

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Towards the Sustainable Use of African WetlandsThe world's wetlands are hanging on to a thinning lifeline, with only 13% of their former extent remaining (Gardner and Finlayson, 2018).Wetlands in Africa probably conform to this picture, but data on trends in African wetland extent is limited (Davidson, 2014).Some indicators suggest increasing pressure on African wetlands since the 1990s, such as the decreasing WET Index (UN WCMC, 2017) and the threat status of wetland-dependent species in Africa (Gardner and Finlayson, 2018).Major threats include the development of hydropower dams, with some 200 new projects planned in Sub-Saharan Africa (Zarfl et al., 2015), continuing population growth and agricultural and urban development (Beuel et al., 2016; OECD-FAO, 2016).African wetlands are important for their global contribution to ecosystem services on which hundreds of millions of rural communities depend directly for their livelihoods (Dixon and Wood, 2003;Rebelo et al., 2010).Increasingly, the essential role of wetlands in climate change mitigation is recognized (Moomaw et al., 2018), and African countries have made remarkable progress with developing policies for wetland conservation and management.Fifty African nations are signatories to the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, with 415 Ramsar sites (www.ramsar.org,Access date 22.01.2021).Nevertheless, implementing wise-use strategies remains challenging due to a lack of capacity for policy implementation (Ostrovskaya et al., 2013), and knowledge gaps with respect to wise-use.African countries are looking for a sustainable pathway between wetland development, for sustaining the livelihoods of millions of people; and wetlands conservation, to maintain ecosystem service and biodiversity values of wetlands (Wood et al., 2013).This Research Topic brings together contributions on their geomorphological classification, biological diversity, and ecological functioning, all relevant to the management of African wetlands.One of the prerequisites of adequate wetland management policies is knowledge of the extent and status of wetlands in a country.Wetland inventories in Africa are often incomplete and monitoring is rare.Stephenson et al. suggest that barriers to effective monitoring range from data availability and quality to willingness and capacity to use monitoring data.They conclude that application of common, policy-relevant indicators, scaling up of traditional and appropriate new tools and protocols, and capacity and partnership building are the main tasks ahead.Wetland management is often hindered by a lack of dedicated expertize, and declining funds.In a new cost-saving approach, Job et al. did a first full wetland inventory of Mountain Zebra National Park (South Africa) using existing data, imagery, and a participatory approach to select a subset of target sites to assess wetland condition.Significantly, none of the target sites were National Freshwater Ecosystem Priority Areas, highlighting the importance of the participatory approach.Wetland classification in South Africa emphasizes the landscape setting of wetlands as a basis for classification.Grenfell et al. propose to include the geomorphic processes of wetland formation in a new genetic geomorphic

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