Line

Gordon

PhD

Deputy director and deputy science director

line.gordon@su.se

+46 8 674 70 88

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Staff profile

Further to her centre managerial tasks, Line Gordon is also assistant professor at the Stockholm Resilience Centre with a focus on freshwater resources, ecosystem services and food production

Profile summary

  • Line did her PhD in Natural Resources Management at Stockholm University
  • Gordon is an associate member of the Resilience Alliance
  • She is also a subject
    editor of the journal Ecology and Society and on the editorial board of Water International

Her research interests looks at how resilience thinking can enable better management of natural resources. Her work ranges from the global to the local (mainly sub-Saharan Africa) scale.

She is currently involved in three main research areas:

1. Resilience of smallholder agriculture in dryland sub-Saharan Africa
Dryland sub-Saharan Africa is challenged by extreme inter- and intra-annual rainfall variability. Improving water management in rainfed agriculture seems to be a key feature of building resilience in these landscapes. This work involves fieldwork in southern Niger, Kwa-ZuluNatal (South Africa) and the Pangani River (Tanzania).

2. Assessments of bundles of ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes
Agriculture increases food production, but often at on the expense of other ecosystem services. In this research field, Gordon aims to increase the empirical and conceptual knowledge of how ecosystem services interact with each other, in order to improve management so as to that can take advantage of synergies among ecosystem services and minimize unfavorable trade-offs. She also analyzes the relationship between regulating ecosystem services and ecosystem resilience. Fieldwork is conducted in Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa.

3. Agriculture, climate change, hydrology and regime shifts
Agriculture and climate change alter terrestrial and aquatic hydrology and affect ecosystem resilience. Gordon is particularly interested in global-scale mapping of regions that are vulnerable to agriculture and water-driven ecosystem regime shifts.

Another project, on climate, hydrology and socio-ecological resilience in the Arctic, seeks understanding of the vulnerability of  various regions in the Arcticare to hydrologically driven regime shifts.

Line Gordon did her PhD in Natural Resources Management at the Department of Systems Ecology at Stockholm University. She spent her post doc at the International Water Management Institute, Colombo, Sri Lanka within the Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture. She also served as a coordinating lead-author for the Ecosystem Chapter.

Truly interested in transdisciplinary research as well as in the interface of science and society, 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 also serves on the Scientific Program Committee of the World Water Week and serves on the board of Albaeco, an institute devoted to the communication of sustainability science to the general public.

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Gordon, Line

Publications by Gordon, Line

Approaching moisture recycling governance

Keys, P., Wang-Erlandsson, L., Gordon, L.J., Galaz, V., Ebbesson, J.

2017 - Journal / article

The spatial and temporal dynamics of water resources are a continuous challenge for effective and sustainable national and international governance. The watershed is the most common spatial unit in water resources governance, which typically includes only surface and groundwater. However, recent advances in hydrology have revealed ‘atmospheric watersheds’ – otherwise known as precipitationsheds. Water flowing within a precipit...

Agricultural ecosystems and their services: the vanguard of sustainability?

DeClerck, F. A. J., Jones, S. K., Attwood, S., Bossio, D., Girvetz, E., Chaplin-Kramer, B., Enfors, E., Fremier, A. K., Gordon, L. J., Kizito, F., Lopez Noriega, I., Matthews, N., McCartney, M., Meacham, M., Noble, A., Quintero, M., Remans, R., Soppe, R., Willemen, L., Wood, S. L. R. and Zhang, W.

2017 - Journal / article

Sustainable Development Goals offer an opportunity to improve human well-being while conserving natural resources. Ecosystem services highlight human well-being benefits ecosystems, including agricultural ecosystems, provides. Whereas agricultural systems produce the majority of our food, they drive significant environmental degradation. This tension between development and environmental conservation objectives is not an immut...

Assessment of ecosystem services and benefits in village landscapes – A case study from Burkina Faso

Sinare, H., Gordon, L. J., Enfors Kautsky, E.

2016 - Journal / article

Most methods to assess ecosystem services have been developed on large scales and depend on secondary data. Such data is scarce in rural areas with widespread poverty. Nevertheless, the population in these areas strongly depends on local ecosystem services for their livelihoods. These regions are in focus for substantial landscape investments that aim to alleviate poverty, but current methods fail to capture the vast range of ...

Principle 3 Manage slow variables and feedbacks

Biggs, R. (Oonsie), L.J. Gordon, C. Raudsepp-Hearne, M. Schlüter, B. Walker

2015 - Book chapter

Many social-ecological systems can exist in different self-organizing configurations or 'regimes'. Each of these configurations produces a different set of ecosystem services, with different consequences for different users. Changes in controlling slow variables can cause a system to shift from one regime to another if certain thresholds are exceeded and there is a change in dominat feedback processes in the social-ecological ...

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Gordon, Line

Stockholm Resilience Centre is a collaboration between Stockholm University and the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

Stockholm Resilience Centre
Stockholm University, Kräftriket 2B
SE-10691
Phone: +46 8 674 70 70
info@stockholmresilience.su.se

Organisation number: 202100-3062
VAT No: SE202100306201