This project will integrate recent advances into an interdisciplinary human ecosystem framework to advance understanding of urban social and ecological systems, focusing specifically on the dynamic factors that cross social and ecological boundaries. The project will test hypotheses regarding the relationships between actions of managers and stewards who maintain the urban forest in New York City, the ecological processes that govern its abundance, diversity and suitability as habitat, and a key societal service it provides, temperature regulation of the urban microclimate. These hypotheses will be tested using multiscale and multitemporal analyses of stewardship group activities and evolution of this urban forest over the past 25 years. The analyses will use satellite derived land cover maps, social surveys and interviews, and vegetation and faunal data. The objective is to understand links between stewardship, ecological processes and ecosystem services in ways that directly inform stakeholders, managers and policy makers.

Urban green space provides a number of societal benefits in addition to habitat for plants and animals. These include regulation of local temperature, cleaning of air and water, reduction in storm water runoff and associated sewage system overflows, and physical and psychological benefits to humans of being close to and interacting with nature. The primary goal of this project is to study the links between the efforts and goals of stewardship organizations, development of green space and its associated flora and fauna, and temperature regulation. A secondary goal is to provide a set of analytical methods that can be used to study other services and other cities. New York City has an unparalleled supply of preexisting data, a comprehensive survey of environmental stewardship organizations, a dense and diverse human population, and a variety of city led tree planting efforts. This research will increase general understanding of the dynamic connections among stewardship, land cover, and ecosystem services, and also inform the management of the natural resources in the city.

Project Report

This project aimed to understand urban regreening efforts by looking specifically at New York City and the MillionTreesNYC initiative, which aims to plant 1 million trees in the city by 2017. The project studied the connections between the growth and change of urban green space, the capacity of those spaces to support biological communities and provide ecosystem services such as thermoregulation, and how stewardship happens in a diverse urban setting like New York City. This project achieved a number of goals related the focus of our research. We constructed a tri-temporal change map that visualizes vegetation change trajectories in NYC over the two decades spanning 1990 to 2010. The data reveal that New York City experienced an overall loss of vegetation during the two decades in question but that most neighborhoods' vegetation was stable. The largest areas of change occurred in parks and other green spaces, and many instances of change can be traced back to specific management actions or development that changed the local landscape of a given area. We were able to integrate these findings into our analysis of environmental stewardship in New York City. The researchconcluded that there are significant overlaps between landuse change and stewardship (see attached figures). These findings have been shared with policymakers in New York City and beyond, as well as through a publication to the scholarly community. This project also found that volunteers who participate in regreening efforts such as the MillionTreesNYC initiative tend to be more engaged in environmetal and civic activities than the general American population. They also tend to be more female, more highly educated, and more racially homogenous than the general population of the areas where they volunteer. These findings are consistent with the broader research on volunteering in America. These findings were shared with representatives from the city in a variety of ways. The conversations provided opportunities for policymakers to consider how they can more effectively mobilize local people to get involved in the MillionTreesNYC initiative. These findings, along with others about how stewardship groups connect with one another, were also distributed to the scholarly community in the form of peer-reviewed publications.

Agency
National Science Foundation (NSF)
Institute
Division of Environmental Biology (DEB)
Type
Standard Grant (Standard)
Application #
1128370
Program Officer
Henry L. Gholz
Project Start
Project End
Budget Start
2010-12-31
Budget End
2013-02-28
Support Year
Fiscal Year
2011
Total Cost
$176,384
Indirect Cost
Name
University of Maryland College Park
Department
Type
DUNS #
City
College Park
State
MD
Country
United States
Zip Code
20742