Resilience-Based Sustainability Indicators for Freshwater Lakes with Application for Dongting Lake, China

This paper develops a framework for incorporating resilience into sustainability indicators for freshwater lakes. The sustainability of freshwater lakes is important from both, an ecological point of view and within a socio-economic context, as these systems are sensitive to external disturbances an...

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Main Authors: Xu, Li, Marinova, Dora, Xin, P., Guo, Xiumei
Format: Journal Article
Published: Canadian Center of Science and Education 2015
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/30335
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author Xu, Li
Marinova, Dora
Xin, P.
Guo, Xiumei
author_facet Xu, Li
Marinova, Dora
Xin, P.
Guo, Xiumei
author_sort Xu, Li
building Curtin Institutional Repository
collection Online Access
description This paper develops a framework for incorporating resilience into sustainability indicators for freshwater lakes. The sustainability of freshwater lakes is important from both, an ecological point of view and within a socio-economic context, as these systems are sensitive to external disturbances and susceptible to changes in land coverage, vegetation distribution, hydrological conditions and perturbations from human activities. Existing sustainability indicators do not incorporate resilience and consequently do not reflect the ability of the lake to withstand the impacts of shocks and improve its current state for achieving sustainable over time. The developed resilience framework is applied for the case of China’s Dongting Lake, which is exposed to the impacts of the Three-Gorges Dam in addition to experiencing ecological and socio-economic changes. The resilience perspective allows 37 indicators to be developed to describe and monitor the Lake’s sustainability based on considering known, possible and unknown future changes. They can inform any future resilience management of its complex ecological system.
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institution Curtin University Malaysia
institution_category Local University
last_indexed 2025-11-14T08:18:30Z
publishDate 2015
publisher Canadian Center of Science and Education
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spelling curtin-20.500.11937-303352017-09-13T15:30:24Z Resilience-Based Sustainability Indicators for Freshwater Lakes with Application for Dongting Lake, China Xu, Li Marinova, Dora Xin, P. Guo, Xiumei This paper develops a framework for incorporating resilience into sustainability indicators for freshwater lakes. The sustainability of freshwater lakes is important from both, an ecological point of view and within a socio-economic context, as these systems are sensitive to external disturbances and susceptible to changes in land coverage, vegetation distribution, hydrological conditions and perturbations from human activities. Existing sustainability indicators do not incorporate resilience and consequently do not reflect the ability of the lake to withstand the impacts of shocks and improve its current state for achieving sustainable over time. The developed resilience framework is applied for the case of China’s Dongting Lake, which is exposed to the impacts of the Three-Gorges Dam in addition to experiencing ecological and socio-economic changes. The resilience perspective allows 37 indicators to be developed to describe and monitor the Lake’s sustainability based on considering known, possible and unknown future changes. They can inform any future resilience management of its complex ecological system. 2015 Journal Article http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/30335 10.5539/enrr.v5n2p165 Canadian Center of Science and Education restricted
spellingShingle Xu, Li
Marinova, Dora
Xin, P.
Guo, Xiumei
Resilience-Based Sustainability Indicators for Freshwater Lakes with Application for Dongting Lake, China
title Resilience-Based Sustainability Indicators for Freshwater Lakes with Application for Dongting Lake, China
title_full Resilience-Based Sustainability Indicators for Freshwater Lakes with Application for Dongting Lake, China
title_fullStr Resilience-Based Sustainability Indicators for Freshwater Lakes with Application for Dongting Lake, China
title_full_unstemmed Resilience-Based Sustainability Indicators for Freshwater Lakes with Application for Dongting Lake, China
title_short Resilience-Based Sustainability Indicators for Freshwater Lakes with Application for Dongting Lake, China
title_sort resilience-based sustainability indicators for freshwater lakes with application for dongting lake, china
url http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/30335