The Kahovka catastrophe in the context of catastrophic ecology: Thematic structure and semantic topology of research on catastrophic ecosystem change
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32819/202602Keywords:
regime shifts; resilience; bibliometrics; topic modeling; Multidimensional Scaling; centroid structure; disturbance regimes; hydrogeomorphological reorganization.Abstract
Abstract. The destruction of the Kahovka Dam in June 2023 caused one of the largest ecological disasters in contemporary Europe and triggered profound hydrological, geomorphological, and biotic transformations across the Lower Dnipro region. This catastrophe created an urgent need for practical ecological research and for broader theoretical generalization within the field of catastrophic ecology. The objective of this study was to determine how catastrophic ecosystem change is structured in the international scientific literature and to clarify the conceptual position of the Kahovka catastrophe within this broader research landscape. A bibliographic corpus of publications on catastrophic changes in ecosystems was analyzed using text mining of titles, abstracts, and keywords. After preprocessing and filtering of lexical units, Latent Dirichlet Allocation was applied to identify the main thematic blocks of the literature. Their relationships were examined using Multidimensional Scaling, while conceptual structuring was assessed through citation analysis using generalized linear modeling and topic-specific distances from thematic centroids. The analysis revealed five major thematic directions: catastrophic shifts of ecosystems, climate change as a cause of ecosystem catastrophes, habitat extinction in the context of ecosystem catastrophes, catastrophic disturbance and forest ecosystem reorganization, and catastrophic change in aquatic and riparian ecosystems. The multidimensional configuration showed that catastrophic ecology is organized as a differentiated semantic field rather than as a single homogeneous discourse. The climate-change and aquatic-riparian blocks demonstrated the strongest increase in prominence over time, whereas the disturbance block showed a gradual decline. At the same time, the catastrophic-shift and disturbance themes displayed clearer conceptual structuring, because citation-effective publications were concentrated closer to their thematic centroids. These findings indicate that catastrophic ecology combines a central theoretical discourse on resilience, thresholds, and regime shifts with several partially autonomous applied domains related to climate, biodiversity loss, disturbance, and water-related transformations. In this perspective, the Kahovka catastrophe can be understood as a contemporary large-scale case that connects several of these semantic directions simultaneously and therefore provides an important basis for the further development of catastrophic ecology as an empirical and theoretical field.
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