Line Gordon is assistant professor at Stockholm University based at the Stockholm Resilience Centre (75%) and Department of Systems Ecology (5%). She is also a researcher at Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) (20%). At the Stockholm Resilience Centre she leads the theme on “Governing freshwater for food and other ecosystem services" together with Johan Rockström. Her research interests lies in the realm of interactions among freshwater resources, ecosystem services and food production. Freshwater scarcity is one of the major challenges facing this planet today, and food production is the main water user in terms of liquid ("blue") water. Her focus has primarily been on quantifying human alterations of water vapor (“green") flows through land use and land cover change at regional to global scales. She has also developed conceptual frameworks for analyzing the role of water to sustain terrestrial ecosystem services. She have been particularly interested in how to deal with trade-offs between freshwater for food production and for other ecosystem services, and how improvement (primarily in rainfed) agriculture can help reducing these trade-offs.
She did her post doc at International Water Management Institute, Colombo, Sri Lanka within the Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture and served for example as a coordinating lead-author for the Ecosystem Chapter. The assessment was released in March 2007.
Her current research is primarily focusing on how agriculture changes water flows in a way that alter the resilience of agricultural landscapes and trigger regime shifts in ecosystems at various scales. She is involved in global assessments of areas vulnerable to regime shifts as well as in field work in rainfed farming systems in the drylands of sub-Saharan Africa (the Thukela River basin in South Africa and Pangani River basin in Tanzania) within the SSI-program (Smallholder system innovations in integrated watershed management).
Gordon is an associate member of the Resilience Alliance, a subject editor of the journal Ecology and Society and on the editorial board of Water International. She is truly interested in transdisciplinary research as well as in the interface of science and society. She is also the chairman of Albaeco, an Institute devoted to communicate sustainability science to the general public.
Publications
In review
Hannertz, F., Gordon, L.J., Destonius, G., Global runoff data representativeness and land cover data discrepancies in evapotranspiration and runoff assessments, submitted to Water Resources Research.
Deutsch, L., Falkenmark, M., Gordon, L., Rockström, J. Folke, C. Water-mediated ecological consequences of intensive livestock production. Book chapter in: Livestock in a changing landscape: Drivers, Consequences and Responses. Eds. Steinfeld, H, Mooney, H. and Schneider, F. Livestock, Environment and Development Initiative — LEAD at FAO, SCOPE program on Consequences of Industrialized Animal Production Systems, and the Swiss College of Agriculture
Gordon, L.J., Finlayson, M.C. Falkenmark, M. Managing water in agriculture to deal with trade-offs and find synergies among food and other ecosystem services. Submitted to Agricultural Water Management.
Publications
In revision
Enfors, E. I., Gordon, L.J. Strategies to deal with drought among smallholder farmers in semi-arid Tanzania A study from the Makanya catchment of climate related poverty traps and water system innovations. In revision Global Environmental Change.
In press/print
Gordon, L.J., Peterson, G.D., Bennett, E., Agricultural modifications of hydrological flows create ecological surprises. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, in press
Gordon, L.J, Enfors, E. Land degradation, ecosystem services and resilience of smallholder farmers in Makanya catchment, Tanzania. Book Chapter prepared for the Comprehensive Assessment book “Reversing the Trends in Land and Water Degradation", in press.
Enfors, E., Gordon, L.J. (2007) Analysing resilience in dryland agro-ecosystems: A case study of the Makanya catchment in Tanzania over the past 50 years. Land Degradation & Development, 18(6) 680 - 696
