Intermittent rivers and ephemeral streams (IRES) are prevalent and dominate many regions, including in several parts of Europe. With climate change and increased abstraction, their number and length is expanding. IRES support high and unique biodiversity values and promote key ecological functions and ecosystem services to people and society. However, they are being degraded at alarming rates due to poor recognition and lack of appropriate conceptual framework to understand, predict and manage their biodiversity and associated functions and ecosystem services. The current development of metasystem approaches which recognize the processes determining biodiversity both at local and regional scales offer a robust and promising framework to understand and predict the effect of climate change on riverine biodiversity and ecosystem services. Adapting this framework to highly dynamic settings such as IRES represents a major breakthrough which would offer to understand and predict 1) how biodiversity is organized in space and time in such fragmented networks 2) how services are produced, transported and used within riverscapes 3) optimize in time and space biodiversity conservation and management practices with respect to climate change scenarios. By responding to the H2020 call ‘Inter-relations between climate change, biodiversity and ecosystem services’, our objectives are to i. model river flows and water uses under climatic scenarios at both European and sentinel catchment scales ii. develop a conceptual framework to cascade these scenarios into biodiversity and ecosystem responses in a meta-system approach iii. identify tipping points in IRES and relevant predictors (eg drying length, duration, timing) and define safe operational spaces (eg flow variability and fragmentation ranges) iv. improve existing catchment-scale tools (eg Estimkart, MARXAN) to manage biodiversity and ecosystem services v. determine nature-based solutions to optimize adaptation and mitigation strategies to climate change in Europe and vi. to seek synergies with on-going H2020 efforts in relation with environmental policies in Europe. Within a strong network of ~15 highly knowledgeable European partners from different disciplines, built thanks to an on-going COST Action (www.smires.eu) coordinated by the current project PI, we will meet the 3 H2020 assessment criteria: excellence, impact and feasibility. This MRSEI grant will allow organizing 2 workshops and assistance from a consulting company to prepare our response and succeed in the call. This will put France on the font of the scene with respect to mitigate and adapt climate change effects on biodiversity and ecosystems services provided by hydrological networks.