Regime Shifts and Ecosystem Service Generation in Swedish Coastal Soft Bottom Habitats: When Resilience is Undesirable
By M. Troell, L. Pihl, P. Rönnbäck, H. Wennhage, T. Söderqvist, N. Kautsky. 2005
122 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Ecosystems can undergo regime shifts where they suddenly change from one state into another. This can have important implications for formulation of management strategies, if system characteristics develop that are undesirable from a human perspective, and that have a high resistance to restoration efforts. This paper identifies some of the ecological and economic consequences of increased abundance of filamentous algae on shallow soft bottoms along the Swedish west coast. It is suggested that a successive increase in the sediment nutrient pool has undermined the resilience of these shallow systems. After the regime shift has occurred, self-generation properties evolve keeping the system locked in a high-density algae state. The structural and functional characteristics of the new system state differ significantly from the original one, resulting in less valuable ecosystem goods and services generated for society. In Sweden, loss of value results from the reduced capacity for mitigating further coastal eutrophication, reduced habitat quality for commercial fishery species, and the loss of aesthetic and recreational values.
Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Global and Planetary Change, Management Science and Operations Research
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ab4201bc5626c9cc2e04583481c42dc3503e3fa3
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In Environmental Engineering
In Global and Planetary Change
- Audrey L. Mayer
- E. Drakou
- Chiara Piroddi
- Benis N. Egoh
- Stelios Katsanevakis
- N. Dulvy
- S. A. Pardo
- A. Cooper
In Management Science and Operations Research
Citations in the corpus
- Current Status and Future Prospects for the Assessment of Marine and Coastal Ecosystem Services: A Systematic Review (2013, background): “The state of the ecosystem, in particular related to pollution and other disturbing factors, is already covered by some of the proposed indicators [74], but could be explored further.”
- Strengths and weaknesses of common sustainability indices for multidimensional systems. (2008, background): “Desirability Sustainability not only refers to the resilience of a system in a particular regime, but also the desirability of that regime to humans (Troell et al., 2005).”