The rapid growth of urban concentrations poses major challenges to local and global ecosystems and tests the very limits of governance. New urban growth can reduce and fragment nonhuman habitats, introduce exotic organisms, and severely modify energy flow and nutrient cycles, while urban development severely affects hydrological cycles and air quality, reducing the capacity of an ecosystem to absorb disturbance. These challenges will require that planners, program designers, and environmental managers keep pace with the concomitant spatial, political, and economic transformations while reducing the adverse ecological impact of urban developments. In the face of these challenges, new forms of complex social, political and economic decision making systems are evolving. This interdisciplinary research project is designed to improve understanding of resilience in urban socioecological systems, with the over-arching question: How do human governance and biophysical systems respond interactively to both press and pulse disturbances in urban socio-ecological systems? The investigators will focus on Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver, Washington, two cities in a single metropolitan area that have developed over the last 30 years under contrasting policy regimes at the state, regional, and local levels. The investigators will pursue three major research questions: (1) How do differences in local and state levels of governance and policy affect the resilience of both social and ecological landscapes? (2) How do alternative land-use planning strategies affect provision of ecosystem services in response to different disturbance factors? (3) How effectively do the processes and outcomes of monitoring ecosystem services provide a usable feedback loop in urban socioecological systems? Their research design will consist of four focused research projects and two project-wide unifying activities. The first research project will examine governance effects on the spatial pattern and timing of development at the regional scale. The second project will examine relationships among disturbances resulting from development and urban water quality. The third project will focus on riparian vegetation changes, and the fourth project will focus on green infrastructure, with both examining the exchange and use of information and interactions among social actors at the city and neighborhood scales. The two cross-cutting activities will complement the research projects by focusing on how urban residents perceive and manage urban ecosystem resources. The first activity will examine civic ecology and information for decision making. The investigators will apply a common framework to all four research projects to study how ecological information feeds back into societal decision making. The second activity will engage secondary school teachers and their students in the Portland-Vancouver region in urban environmental restoration and research projects. The project will create and support networks of teachers, youth, and organizations conducting ecological research and will develop and test meaningful measures of how teacher and youth involvement in ecological projects contributes to urban resilience.
The intellectual merit of the project includes micro-level and meso-level foci on the connections among human perceptions, citizen engagement, and ecosystem services in developing urban resilience, which should lead to insights about how human systems adapt to disturbance. The study area, a metropolitan region containing cities with contrasting governance systems and starkly different land-use policies, is well suited for analysis and comparison of complex interactions between social and ecological systems. Portland's "sustainability mystique" will be scrutinized and assessed both socioeconomically and ecologically. Inclusion of external forces of population growth and climate change while simultaneously examining internal community adaptations will help identify unanticipated feedback loops or failures. The broader impacts of this project will include creation of a network of learners in urban areas that cross jurisdictional, disciplinary, institutional, and geographic boundaries. Research findings will be put in place experimentally and institutionally by cities and metropolitan agencies interested in building on the synergies found in integrative approaches to management. These results should help break down past divisions between socioeconomic and ecological thinking and help improve understanding and application of factors controlling how human governance affects socioecological resilience in urban areas. 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.
