Over the next fifty years, U.S. cities will double in population and land area, creating a pressing need for science to inform sustainable growth. While considerable advances have been made in the ecological study of cities, many research challenges remain. A particular need is for greater understanding of the complex responses of ecological systems to changing human policies and activities and responses of humans to these changes. As one of the nation's mature founding cities, Boston has been evolving for almost 400 years. The Boston metropolitan region is projected to grow in population by 5.5 percent and lose 140,000 acres of open space to residential development by 2030. This research project will pursue research and related activities designed to provide a model of sound science in service of the common ecological good of urban communities and their surrounding regions. Through a partnership involving the City of Boston, the non-profit Urban Ecology Institute, and seven academic institutions, the investigators will address three major topics: (1) the primary historical and social factors affecting local and regional changes in land use; (2) the complex linkages among social conditions (such as wealth, social capital, and land-use policies), biophysical processes (such as resources for animal populations and hydrological flows), and linked social and ecological outcomes (such as people's attachment to place and an area's biodiversity); and (3) future conditions for people and the environment in greater Boston under different scenarios. Land-use changes to be examined include urban greening at local scales and suburbanization and urban infill at broader scales. Urban greening, such as tree planting, community gardening, and riparian restoration, represents a significant, though understudied avenue for feedback between human actions, ecosystem changes, and new human energy in response. The investigators will employ citizen-driven greening projects as opportunistic experiments, conducting research on testable predictions regarding consequences for people and the environment. From this perspective, urban greening can be placed in the context of broader-scale processes, such as suburbanization and urban infill. Partnership with two extensive non-profit networks will facilitate active involvement of citizens and decision-makers in field studies as well as synthesis of data from ongoing research. Their involvement will facilitate the study of feedbacks from information to knowledge to action and ecosystem response. A series of scenario-building workshops will examine alternative spatial patterns for locating development, forest cover, and plantings under the Boston mayor's 100,000 trees initiative. Scenarios also will address the potential impacts of climate change. Stakeholders and scientists will collaborate on defining the goals, policies, and assumptions for the scenarios. Maps and images of scenarios will be used in transmitting and translating project findings. In addition to directly supporting undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate education, the project will leverage programs serving more than 2,000 middle and high school students annually, approximately 90 percent of whom come from underserved communities.
A central recent advance in urban ecology has been the recognition that human actions strongly influence ecological patterns and that these human actions are themselves conditioned by values, lifestyle, experiences, social group, and institutional forces. This project will deepen and extend these theoretical insights by focusing explicitly on a diverse set of socioeconomic drivers that are changing the forest cover and composition of the Boston metropolitan area. The project's focus on urban greening as a form of urban land-use and land-cover change creates opportunities for new insights into feedback loops between humans and the environment. Whereas greening previously was viewed as a set of practices rather than as an integral component of an urban system, through the use of scenarios, this project will begin to make a more thorough integration of urban ecological theory and the science of climate change. This award was funded as an Urban Long-Term Research Area Exploratory (ULTRA-Ex) award as the result of a special competition jointly supported by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service.
