Line Gordon is a Swedish sustainability scientist whose transdisciplinary research combines food, water, and the benefits people receive from nature. Gordon is the director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre and a professor at Stockholm University, Sweden. She is also on the board of the EAT foundation, and often participates in public discussions of food and climate in Sweden.

Line Gordon
Line Gordon speaking at the Fridays for Future climate demonstration on September 27, 2019 in Stockholm.
Alma materStockholm University(PhD)
Known forPrecipitationshed, moisture recycling, Planetary diet
Scientific career
Fieldsecohydrology, ecosystem services, food systems, earth system science
InstitutionsStockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University
Thesis Land Use, Freshwater Flows and Ecosystem Services in an Era of Global Change
Doctoral advisorsMalin Falkenmark, Carl Folke
Websitehttps://www.stockholmresilience.org/contact-us/staff/2008-01-08-gordon.html

Early life and education

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Gordon, was born and raised in Stockholm, Sweden. She was a high school exchange student in Northern Australia, and a university exchange student in Burkina Faso. As an undergraduate she studied biology. Her interest in further study in ecology was sparked by a lecture by Carl Folke on how people are connected to ecosystems, and this experience led her to contact him, and go on to study for a PhD with him at Stockholm University.

Gordon's PhD focussed on the role of water in the biosphere at local and planetary scales. Her PhD was supervised by Carl Folke and Malin Falkenmark in Systems Ecology at Stockholm University. Gordon spend part of her PhD in Canberra, Australia collaborating with Australian scientists at CSIRO.[1] The final paper from her thesis was the first assessment of how human land use change, especially deforestation and irrigation, had altered the flow of evaporative water into the atmosphere.[2] Gordon's earned her PhD in 2003 in Natural Resources Management, Department of Systems Ecology, Stockholm University for her dissertation “Land Use, Freshwater Flows and Ecosystem Services in an Era of Global Change”. In 2004, her PhD was recognized Stiftelsen Kung Carl XVI Gustafs 50-års fond, an award for excellent PhDs.

Career and research

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Following her PhD, Gordon was a postdoctoral fellow at the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) in Colombo, Sri Lanka. There she worked with David Molden on the Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture. Following that she returned to Stockholm University where she worked as a researcher, in 2006 at the Department of Systems Ecology and then from 2007 at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. She became an associate professor in 2012, and deputy director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre in 2013. She has also been a visiting researcher at CIRAD in France, McGill University in Canada, and STIAS - the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study in Stellenbosch, South Africa.

In 2018, Gordon became director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre.[3] The Stockholm Resilience Centre is a partnership of Stockholm University and the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. It is a large transdisciplinary sustainability research centre with about 150 staff, which has Masters and PhD programmes in sustainability science. In 2021, she was appointed the Curt Bergfors Professor in sustainable food systems.[4]

Gordon's research has three main themes: research in Africa, water, and food. Gordon has had long term research engagement in Africa. Over the past 15 years, she has conducted research in Burkina Faso, Tanzania, South Africa, Senegal, and Ghana. Gordon's research on water has focussed on unravelling the critical roles of how evaporation of water impacts water flows. With her PhD student Patrick Keys, she developed the concept of the precipitationshed.[5] From her work on agriculture, Gordon moved on to the ecology of the food system, and she has increasingly collaborated with chefs and food producers. She is on the board of the EAT Foundation,[6] and is one of the authors of the EAT-Lanet planetary health diet,[7] which developed dietary guidelines that aim to provide healthy nutritious food to the world's people while limiting the damage of farming to the Earth's climate, nature, water.[8][9]

Gordon's leadership on sustainable and healthy food was noted by the magazine Aktuell Hållbarhet,[10] which considered her one of the 100 most powerful Swedish sustainability leaders, and she entered their top ten in 2021.[11]

Notable publications

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Gordon's most cited research has been on ecosystem services, food, and water.[12] Her work has been published across a wide variety of journals spanning topics from global change, to food, and agro-ecosystems. Four of her most highly cited works are:

  • Gordon, Line J.; Steffen, Will; Jönsson, Bror F.; Folke, Carl; Falkenmark, Malin; Johannessen, Åse (24 May 2005). "Human modification of global water vapor flows from the land surface". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 102 (21): 7612–7617. Bibcode:2005PNAS..102.7612G. doi:10.1073/pnas.0500208102. PMC 1140421. PMID 15890780.
  • Gordon, Line J.; Peterson, Garry D.; Bennett, Elena M. (April 2008). "Agricultural modifications of hydrological flows create ecological surprises". Trends in Ecology & Evolution. 23 (4): 211–219. doi:10.1016/j.tree.2007.11.011. PMID 18308425.
  • Bennett, Elena M.; Peterson, Garry D.; Gordon, Line J. (December 2009). "Understanding relationships among multiple ecosystem services". Ecology Letters. 12 (12): 1394–1404. doi:10.1111/j.1461-0248.2009.01387.x. PMID 19845725.
  • Gordon, Line J.; Finlayson, C. Max; Falkenmark, Malin (April 2010). "Managing water in agriculture for food production and other ecosystem services". Agricultural Water Management. 97 (4): 512–519. doi:10.1016/j.agwat.2009.03.017.

References

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  1. ^ Gordon, Line; Dunlop, M; Foran, B (2003). "Land cover change and water vapour flows: learning from Australia". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences. 358 (1440): 1973–1984. doi:10.1098/rstb.2003.1381. PMC 1693281. PMID 14728792.
  2. ^ Gordon, Line J.; Steffen, Will; Jönsson, Bror F.; Folke, Carl; Falkenmark, Malin; Johannessen, Åse (24 May 2005). "Human modification of global water vapor flows from the land surface". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 102 (21): 7612–7617. Bibcode:2005PNAS..102.7612G. doi:10.1073/pnas.0500208102. PMC 1140421. PMID 15890780.
  3. ^ Per Westergård (2019). "What became of Mistra's biggest funding initiative ever?". MISTRA. Retrieved 16 Oct 2019.
  4. ^ "Line Gordon får Curt Bergfors professur i hållbara livsmedelssystem". Stockholm University. 2021. Retrieved 18 Feb 2021.
  5. ^ P. W. Keys; et al. (2012). "Analyzing precipitationsheds to understand the vulnerability of rainfall dependent regions". Biogeosciences. 9 (2): 733–746. Bibcode:2012BGeo....9..733K. doi:10.5194/bg-9-733-2012.
  6. ^ "Dr. Line J. Gordon PHD".
  7. ^ Willett, Walter; Rockström, Johan; Loken, Brent; Springmann, Marco; Lang, Tim; Vermeulen, Sonja; Garnett, Tara; Tilman, David; DeClerck, Fabrice; Wood, Amanda; Jonell, Malin; Clark, Michael; Gordon, Line J; Fanzo, Jessica; Hawkes, Corinna; Zurayk, Rami; Rivera, Juan A; De Vries, Wim; Majele Sibanda, Lindiwe; Afshin, Ashkan; Chaudhary, Abhishek; Herrero, Mario; Agustina, Rina; Branca, Francesco; Lartey, Anna; Fan, Shenggen; Crona, Beatrice; Fox, Elizabeth; Bignet, Victoria; Troell, Max; Lindahl, Therese; Singh, Sudhvir; Cornell, Sarah E; Srinath Reddy, K; Narain, Sunita; Nishtar, Sania; Murray, Christopher J L (February 2019). "Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems" (PDF). The Lancet. 393 (10170): 447–492. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31788-4. PMID 30660336. S2CID 58657351.
  8. ^ Damian Carrington (16 Jan 2019). "New plant-focused diet would 'transform' planet's future, say scientists". The Guardian. Retrieved Oct 22, 2019.
  9. ^ James Gallagher (17 Jan 2019). "A bit of meat, a lot of veg - the flexitarian diet to feed 10bn". BBC. Retrieved Oct 22, 2019.
  10. ^ "Hela listan: De 101 mäktigaste i Hållbarhetssverige år 2019" [The entire list: The 101 most powerful in Sustainability in Sweden in 2019]. aktuell hållbarhet (in Swedish). Stockholm: Bonnier Business Media. 2019-06-26. Retrieved 2019-06-28.
  11. ^ "Hela listan: De 101 mäktigaste i Hållbarhetssverige år 2021" [The entire list: The 101 most powerful in Sustainability in Sweden in 2021]. aktuell hållbarhet (in Swedish). Stockholm: Bonnier Business Media. 2021-02-02. Retrieved 2021-02-02.
  12. ^ "Line Gordon - Google Scholar Citations". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2019-10-10.
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