Short-term decisions in lake restoration have long-term consequences for water quality
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Short-term decisions in lake restoration have long-term consequences for water quality ¨ 1 Romina Martin1 · Sonja Radosavljevic1 · Maja Schluter Received: 16 April 2019 / Accepted: 10 April 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Ecological regime shifts from clear to turbid water states in shallow temperate lakes are quite well-investigated phenomena but critical time lags from human interaction with the lake and restoration activities are much less understood. This is a complex challenge for institutions who manage lakes but are usually less familiar with non-linear dynamics, slow and fast influences on water quality and how to manage those from a social-ecological perspective. We extend a well-known minimal model of shallow lake regime shifts to enable simulations over time with short- and long-term management measures (nutrient reduction, trawling, planting of aquatic vegetation). While we explore the mathematical conditions for ecological bistability, we also identify the necessary and sufficient extent of measures to restore the clear water state. Restoration scenarios evaluated by trajectories in the state space demonstrate the increased effectiveness from combined measures even when considering countereffective activities such as pike fishing. But, single measures alone may delay or even miss the overall restoration target. Our analysis demonstrates the importance of understanding transient dynamics where stable state analyses alone remain elusive about alternative ways to interact with bistability. We conclude that successful management of bistable systems, and particularly shallow temperate lakes, needs careful balancing between short-term improvements and long-term influence on the systems state. Keywords Bistability · Shallow temperate lakes · Stylised model · Social-ecological system · Restoration
Introduction Large-scale, persistent and often unexpected changes in a system are referred to as regime shifts (Scheffer et al. 2001). Ecological regime shifts are a prominent phenomenon occurring in different ecosystems with negative implications for human well-being and the sustainability of socialecological systems (Biggs et al. 2018; Rocha et al. 2015; Gunderson et al. 2006). While the ecological feedbacks
This article is part of the Topical Collection in Sustainability of social-ecological systems Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-020-01643-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. Romina Martin
[email protected] 1
Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Kr¨aftriket 2B, Stockholm, 10691, Sweden
that characterise different regimes and shifts between them are quite well understood in many systems, the social dynamics of interactions of people and institutions are much less known (Lade et al. 2013). For shallow lakes, for instance, several mathematical models exist to investigate regime shift dynamics between clear and turbid water states (Mooij et al. 2009; Beisner et al. 2
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