Abstract
Rapid environmental change potentially erodes the resilience of ecosystems. This can eventually result in undesired regime shifts where biodiversity and ecosystem services are lost. This project aims to refine current bioassessment schemes with indicators of resilience in order to reduce uncertainty when forecasting ecological responses to environmental change. We develop the method for lakes and rivers as they are among the most threatened ecosystems worldwide. While the current indices are useful for identifying lakes and rivers that need to be managed or restored to reach acceptable ecological quality, they do not provide the details necessary for determining how stable or vulnerable these ecosystems are. We have identified several ecosystems with long-term datasets of mutliple organism groups in their foodwebs that have been faced with environmental change. They will allow us to refine resilience theory by measuring resilience for the first time at broad spatial and temporal extents and to develop novel statistical tools to assess long-term trends in resilience of landscapes and ecosystems. The information gained in this project will be used to develop a conceptual vulnerability model for management, a resilience library that allows relating resilience indicators to environmental conditions and community composition, and a visual tool based on GIS maps to provide stakeholders with user-friendly means to identify aquatic ecosystems with highest vulnerability across Sweden.
Sweden