Each year societies worldwide are demanding more developed land on a per-capita basis. In the United States, this growing trend is especially common in rapidly urbanizing regions, where conversion of forests and farmlands to low-density built land uses has compromised the sustainability and resilience of local ecosystems and the resources they provide. The natural amenities that once fostered nascent urban economies, such as the availability of clean water, rich farmlands, and productive forests, are being exhausted by more than half of the world's population whose demands for these same essential resources must now be filled by costly surrogates. In most metropolitan regions, these effects are accelerating with little sign of embracing alternative futures for urban growth. Despite the vital services that remnant natural lands provide society, surprisingly little is known about the complex socioecological factors influencing the persistence of forests and farms in areas of rapid population growth. Is it possible for natural and developed lands to coexist in a setting of rapid growth, or are they mutually exclusive? This research project will examine the complex interactions between people and the environment to find ways that allow natural landscapes to remain functional in a rapidly urbanizing region. The project will focus on processes affecting the persistence of forest landscapes in Charlotte, North Carolina. Charlotte is a rapidly growing metropolitan region that sits in the middle of the "Charlanta" megalopolis, which is one of the largest mega-region in the U.S. The investigators will construct and validate a contextual framework of multilevel interdependencies between societal and ecological factors that influence persistence and quality of forest. They will use hierarchical structural equation modeling augmented by interviews, choice experiments, ecological measurement, visual analytics, and the use of geographic information systems and remotely sensed imagery. The project's empirical results will parameterize a spatially explicit agent-based model that will explores alternative futures of urban growth and dynamic interactions between people and environment based on changes in policy, cultural values, and economic drivers at local, regional, and national scales.
Efforts to promote public health and sustainability in rapidly urbanizing regions are routinely impeded by limited understanding of the complex socioecological, multi-scalar, and often conflicting factors that influence persistence of natural landscapes. This research will contribute theoretical and methodological advances to the emerging field of coupled human and natural systems by building an interdisciplinary, policy-oriented analytical framework that combines hierarchy theory (ecology) and structuration theory (social science) with technological advancements in GIScience and visual analytics. This construct will bridge common analytical disconnects related to higher-level institutional processes, ecological heterogeneity, and micro-level consequences of human agency in a testable, contextualizing framework. The combination of hierarchical structural equation modeling, ecological measurement, and interactive survey response will quantify human and ecological intrinsic factors of forest persistence that are notoriously difficult to value in natural resource and environmental economics. The project will involve a diverse group of community engagement partners into all aspects of the research process, including study design, community relations, education, interpretation of results, and outreach. This approach will improve the intellectual merit of the research and widens the range of land-use change solutions and viewpoints ultimately available to regional planners, conservation practitioners, land managers, policy makers, and concerned citizens. The project will explore market and cultural strategies that are likely to emerge when human and ecological intrinsic values of natural lands are better understood. 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.
Farms and natural landscapes form the cornerstones of regional sustainability due to the vital services they provide to society (e.g. clean air and water, provision of food, opportunities for recreation). The goal of this research is to understand if a mix of these undeveloped land use types and urbanization can coexist in equilibrium. We examined the complex interactions between people and the environment which drive landowners to keep forested land, allowing these natural landscapes to remain functional in a rapidly urbanizing region. Working with an array of community engagement partners and stakeholders, we explored these interactions by implementing a unique sampling method that links survey data to ecological field data to explicitly match individuals to their own environments. Our first step in addressing these issues was analyzing urbanization trends and creating a modeling tool that we used to explore alternative scenarios of future urban development patterns and the resulting social and environmental impacts. While our model was based on regional environmental indicators, we also know that the process of urbanization really begins with people’s decisions regarding land management. In the Charlotte region, we found that there are a number of "green" places that have been left behind as urbanization consumes other forested lands. We characterized the individuals who own these forested properties finding that they had diverse motivations for owning forested land such as producing timber, providing wildlife habitat, or maintaining privacy. We also discovered some of the unique challenges that these urban forest owners face as a result of changes in the surrounding environment, including concerns about rising property values and loss of rural community. We analyzed the relationships between the landowner’s (and their property’s) characteristics and their intention to maintain possession of that forested property in the near future. We found that economic values did not tell the whole story – environmental and personal values also played important roles in their decisions. For example, we found that as surrounding farmland decreases, likely being replaced by urban development, forest owners are more likely to sell their properties. This indicates the possibility that forested land will continue to disappear as urbanization changes the landscape. We also found that these forest owners may be interested in engaging in markets for biofuels from forest products, especially if impacts to standing trees can be limited. Additionally, younger and more rural landowners were amenable to converting their unmanaged forests to biofuel cropping systems. Understanding landowner preferences for growing timber for biofuels has additional implications for policy formation and understanding potential environmental, social, and economic impacts of changing land management decisions. In the face of pressures from urbanization and environmental change, we found that these small woodland owners do not have adequate access to incentives that could aid them in retaining their properties. Alternative policies may be needed to promote persistence of forest and associated ecosystem services that are important to the general population in urbanizing areas. These findings can support the formation of improved resources and policies that would support these landowners in managing urban forests.
