I don't think so. I've had liner ponds in the US - but not in an area that got frost - and I was always very careful because I didn't want anything to rip the liner. It never happened so perhaps I was overly worried, but it is nice now not to have to think about it. I can probably go more than 2 years if I get the wet/dry vac out there once or twice a year and pick up some of the muck in the corners. I have a lot of rocks in the pond, some are cemented in and others are loose. I took most of the loose ones out this time and probably won't put them back, a lot of muck collects around them.
I dealt with my overbreeding Mollies and Guppies by putting 10 Angel fish in the pond, they keep the population pretty steady. The Angel's can't get into the bio filter area and the smaller fish tend to stay in there until they are larger... at least, the smart ones do and those are the only ones that survive.
The thing about having a pond in the tropics is that it never gets shut down and everything grows all year. Thus, everything needs a lot more fertilizer. I'm not great about it but I do try and poke a hole in the lily pots every couple months and pour in some fert. That's it. Right now, my big job is I need to get in and pull out hundreds of night blooming lily starts that have popped up. Most are in the nightbloomer pot but that means that none of them are getting very big, there are too many. I need to get it down to one per pot so I get more blooms. There are about 4 large lily plants that had flourished in nooks and crannies of the pond and I left most of them. I'm not sure which lily they are but it is from one or both of the dayblooming blues, one is a NOID and the other is Wood's Blue Goddess. I wish my Foxfire were fertile but it isn't so I am trying to keep the only one I have healthy for many more years.
Foxfire
Wood's Blue Goddess
