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.
Our Urban Long Term Research Areas – Exploratory (ULTRA-Ex) project examined the role of governance for a pair of cities: Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver, Washington. We asked: With two cities right across the Columbia River from each other, how have they evolved along different paths during the last three decades under contrasting land use policies? We examined how differences in local and state levels of governance and policy affect the resilience of both social and ecological landscapes. We also tested how monitoring ecosystem services – the benefits derived from ecosystems, such as clean water and air, and many others – may provide a useful way to track progress. We wanted to learn how sensitive stream corridors are in urban watersheds, to projected changes in climate and population growth, and also how people and institutions respond to such adaptive measures as conservation of riparian areas and using green instead of engineered infrastructure. We evaluated the role of neighborhood associations transferring information about water resources to connect social and ecological components of our work. Results: · We examined neighborhood plans for nine municipalities of the metro area, finding that maintaining big trees, open space and land preservation, water quality, and stormwater/drainage were among the most common planning objectives. · On the Washington side, major influences on the use of scientific information in decision-making include limited decision-maker knowledge and political priorities. Washington jurisdictions appear more driven by external (state/federal) mandates. On the Oregon side, the complexity of issues and challenges of institutional coordination were emphasized. The tighter Oregon state land use law helped establish a more stable political regime. · Based on 1000 survey responses from residents in Portland and Vancouver, differences included the varying importance of landscape features across multiple scales; perceived condition of natural resources; and concerns about future quality of life in the metro area. · Our results indicate that varying levels of governance do affect the resilience of urban ecosystems. For example, in both cities, successful riparian restoration has been observed in the most recent decade, but it also appears that alternative land use planning strategies affect urban ecosystem integrity and services. Our results suggest that positive change can happen along multiple different pathways. As yet it is unclear whether monitoring ecosystem services provides useful feedback for urban management. · Our work is being closely observed by local, state and federal agencies in the metropolitan region, and our findings are helping to inform their management strategies. · This funding generated new and ongoing collaborations between researchers at multiple institutions across disciplines. Multiple journal papers and a number of reports are published or under review. Planning and Land Use Change One goal of our research was to examine how well land use planning policies contain low-density and urban development and conserve forest and agricultural land throughout the two metropolitan areas over the past 30 years. Our four-county study region made it possible to compare land uses and development between three Oregon counties subject to Oregon’s 1973 Land Use Act and Clark County, Washington, which implemented land use planning under Washington’s 1990 Growth Management Act. We used data describing forest, agriculture, and developed land uses from the mid-1970s to the mid-2000s to quantify how much low-density residential and urban development has occurred, both outside and inside of current urban growth boundaries. Our results suggest that land use planning and urban growth boundaries now mandated in both states have enabled counties to contain development and conserve forest and agricultural lands in the Portland-Vancouver metropolitan area. Our results also suggest, however, that these effects differ across the four study-area counties, likely because of differences in counties’ initial levels of development, different land use planning histories, and how restrictively their urban growth boundaries were drawn. Data management Portland-Vancouver ULTRA personnel developed a data management plan in collaboration with the Andrews Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) information management team, an essential part of this kind of large and long-term study. The primary objectives were to inventory existing data resources within the Portland metro area, demonstrate the capability to develop and share research data products by posting selected data sets online within the Andrews LTER central data repository. We combined this opportunity with educating students and researchers on the requirements for preparing and managing data for a long-term data repository. Joint meetings of PV-ULTRA researchers and LTER information managers were used to identify the diverse types of existing PV-ULTRA data, which included long-term data collections at multiple sites, interview and survey data, and spatial GIS (Geographic Information Systems) data. The Andrews information management team also hosted a training workshop for 15 PV-ULTRA students at Oregon State University in December 2011. Students were trained in basic data set organization, metadata requirements, fundamentals in GIS spatial data management, and general data access and sharing policies.
