From 2011 through 2017, the
National Science Foundation (NSF) supported a collaborative research project on
"Urban Sustainability: Research Coordination and Synthesis for a
Transformative Future." This
project was jointly organized and directed by the Baltimore Ecosystem Study
LTER and the Central Arizona Phoenix LTER.
Prof. Daniel L. Childers and I were Co-Directors of the project.
The text here is the "plain
language" public outcomes report as submitted to the Research.gov
website. We hope it gives you some sense
of how BES and its partners are helping to promote the understanding and
application of the popular and important idea of sustainability. The report is divided into the two sections
required by the National Science Foundation -- Intellectual Merit and Broader
Impacts.
Intellectual Merit
The Urban
Sustainability Research Coordination Network (RCN) was designed to improve the
understanding of urban sustainability and to better position ecologists to interact
with policy makers and managers concerned with sustainability in cities,
suburbs, and urban regions. It was
important to focus on urban areas because sustainability research and practice had
mainly focused on natural resources, rural systems, or conservation. Because urban systems are becoming ever more
important in the United States and around the world, improving the
understanding of urban sustainability is a crucial need. Intentionally limited to working with existing
data, the Urban Sustainability RCN had four main objectives: 1) to improve the
availability of knowledge about the sustainability of urban systems; 2) to
generate conceptual frameworks that unify the crucial disciplines needed to
understand and facilitate urban sustainability; 3) to identify research needs
to enhance the future understanding and application of urban sustainability;
and 4) to build a diverse network of sustainability researchers and
practitioners.
This
RCN began with 37 participants from the United States and 4 other countries. The Network grew to engage 80 researchers,
educators, and practitioners from 50 cities in 20 countries. This extensive network brought together a
large amount of data, broad experience with cities of different sizes and
types, and the insights of various cultural and professional backgrounds. The large size of the Network helped to
spread the insights of the intellectual integration very widely around the
nation and globe. The growth of the
Network also reflected the widespread interest in the topic.
The
RCN convened three meetings of the entire group over the course of the grant,
plus smaller thematically oriented meetings.
The themes evolved during the project based on the "all hands"
meetings, and the activities of the working groups. Ultimately, the RCN addressed these themes:
1) conceptual models for urban sustainability; 2) the influence of different
formal and informal governance structures on urban sustainability; 3) the role
of interdisciplinary insights and contributions of the humanities to improved
urban sustainability; 4) how
ecologically informed urban design can improve sustainability through attention
to adaptive resilience; 5) how urban metabolism, that is, the control of
nutrient and energy flow, contributes to
sustainability; and 6) the use of scenario planning as a tool to improve
sustainable urban futures.
The
RCN increased understanding of the social, economic, and environmental triggers
that have led cities to crisis and transition, including discriminating the
different scales on which the triggers act.
This information has been especially useful to reinforcing partnerships
with urban sustainability officers. The
RCN also employed the idea that urban areas are complex systems, in which
triggers affect the adaptive mechanisms that lead toward or away from
sustainability. Finally, the RCN
employed the interactions between water resources and energy resources to
understand important trade-offs that can affect the ability of cities to
transition to sustainability.
Broader Impacts
Several specific outcomes
illustrate the practical success of this RCN.
One is its serving as a seed bed for the Urban Resilience to Extremes
Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN). This multi-institutional program of research
and application, headquartered at Arizona State University, uses several of the
conceptual advances generated by our RCN as the stimulus for new data
collection. A second major project that emerged from this
RCN was funded by Future Earth to investigate sustainability from the
perspective of urban phosphorus dynamics.
Phosphorus is a significant limiting nutrient in ecosystems and a can be
a serious pollutant of surface waters. A
third outcome is cementing interactions with the Research Center for
Eco-Environmental Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, to help develop
sustainability research in the context of the rapid urbanization now underway
in China and elsewhere in developing countries.
Interchanges with Network members in South Africa and in Latin America
ensure that the insights and needs of very different kinds of urban change have
been accounted for in our concepts and in our communication with urban design,
planning, and management practitioners.
An additional important outcome of the RCN was better linking
engineering and urban design perspectives with the important biological basis
of sustainability in urban systems.
The RCN trained several students
and early career scientists. A
total of 20 post-doctoral associates participated as full members of the
RCN. The RCN
employed Post-doctoral associate Meredith Garten for 2.5 years. She is now a
faculty member at Ohio University. Chris Sanchez, Laboratory Manager
for PI Childers, assisted with logistics for the RCN after Dr. Gartin’s
departure; he is now a doctoral student at Arizona State University. Nicholas Weller, also a doctoral student with
Childers, won an NSF EASPI grant to assist with field work on the urban
sustainability pilot project funded by the CAS in Beijing in Summer 2016. The interactions with many sustainability practitioners
are ongoing. So the network established
by this RCN project, continues to advance the conceptual understanding and
pathways for application of sustainability.
Publications
Some of the key or recent publications
produced by the members and working groups of the RCN are these:
Books
Grove, M., M.L. Cadenasso, S.T.A. Pickett, G. Machlis, and
W.R. Burch, Jr (2015). The Baltimore School of Urban Ecology: Space, Scale, and
Time for the Study of Cities Yale
University Press. New Haven. ISBN: 978-0-300-10113-3
Steiner, F. R., G. F. Thompson, and A. Carbonell, editors.
(2016). Nature and cities: the ecological imperative in urban design and
planning The Lincoln Institute of Land
Policy. Cambridge, MA.
Book Chapters
Cadenasso, M.L. and S.T.A. Pickett (2018). Situating
sustainability from an ecological science perspective: Ecosystem services,
resilience, and environmental justice. Situating Sustainability:
Sciences/Humanities/Societies, Scales and Social Justice. Sze, Julie, Editor. New York University Press. New York.
ISBN: 9781479870349, in press.
McPhearson, T. and K. Wijsman (2017). Transitioning complex
urban systems: The importance of urban ecology for sustainability in New York
City. P 65, in Urban Sustainability Transitions
Frantzeskaki, N, V. Castan Broto, L Coenen, and D. Loorbach. Springer.
New York. ISBN:
978-1-315-22838-9.
Steiner, F.R. (2016). Preface/Vorwort. Energy x Change: München und Austin: regionale Zentren nachhaltiger
Entwicklung/Munich and Austin regional centers of sustainable innovation Petra Liedl.
Beuth Verlag GmbH. Berlin. pg 8.
Steiner, FR, and D Pieranunzi (2016). Sites v2. Ecological
Urbanism Revised ed. Mohsen Mostafari and Gareth Doherty. Lars Müller Publishers. Zürich. pg. 514.
Papers in Journals
Bois, P, D.L. Childers, T. Corlouer, J. Laurent, A.
Massicot, C. Sanchez, and A. Wanko. (2017). Confirming a plant-mediated
"biological tide" in an aridland constructed treatment wetland. Ecosphere. 8 (3), e01756.
Bunn, D., B. Büscher, M.L. Cadenasso, D.L. Childers, M.
McHale, S.T.A. Pickett, L. Rivers, L. Swemmer. Golden Wildebeest Days: South
Africa’s Wild Life Economy from Apartheid to Neolibralism. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space,
submitted.
Childers, Daniel, M.L. Cadenasso, J.Morgan Grove, Victoria
Marshall, Brian McGrath, S.T.A. Pickett (2015). An Ecology for Cities: A
Transformational Nexus of Design and Ecology to Advance Climate Change
Resilience and Urban Sustainability.
Sustainability. 7 3774. DOI:
10.3390/su7043774
Grimm, N.B., S.T.A. Pickett, R.L. Hale, and M.L. Cadenasso
(2016). Does the Ecological Concept of Disturbance Have Utility in Urban
Social-Ecological-Technological Systems?.
Ecosystem Health and Sustainability. 3 (1), e01255. DOI: 10.1002/ehs2.1255
Groffman, P.M., M.L. Cadenasso, J. Cavender-Bares, D.L.
Childers, N.B. Grimm, J.M. Grove, S.E. Hobbie, L.R. Hutyra, G.D. Jenerette, T.
McPhearson, D.E. Pataki, S.T.A. Pickett, R.V. Pouyat, E. Rosi-Marshall, and
B.L. Ruddell (2017). Moving toward a new urban system science. Ecosystems. 20. DOI: 10.1007/s10021-016-0053-4
Hersperger, A.M., C Ioja, F. Steiner, and C.A. Tudor.
(2015). Comprehensive consideration of conflicts in the land-use planning
process: a conceptual contribution.
Carpathian Journal of Earth and Environmental Sciences. 10 (4).
McHale, Melissa R., Scott M. Beck, Steward T.A. Pickett,
Daniel L. Childers, Mary L. Cadenasso, Louie Rivers III, Louise Swemmer, Liesel
Ebersohn, Wayne Twine, David Bunn (). Democratization of ecosystem services – A
radically revised framework for assessing nature’s benefits. Ecosystem Health and Sustainability, under
revision.
McHale, Melissa R., Steward TA Pickett, Olga Barbosa, David
N Bunn, Mary L Cadenasso, Dan L Childers, Meredith Gartin, George Hess, David M
Iwaniec, Timon McPhearson, M Nils Peterson, Alexandria K Poole, Louie Rivers
III, Shade T Shutters, and Weiqi Zhou (2015). A New Global Urban Realm:
Complex, Connected, Diffuse, and Diverse Socio-Ecological Systems. Sustainability. 7 5211. DOI: 10.3390/su70566
McPhearson, Timon, S.T.A. Pickett, N. Grimm, J. Niemelä, M.
Alberti, T. Elmqvist, C. Weber, J. Breuste, D. Haase, and S. Qureshi (2016).
Advancing Urban Ecology Towards a Science of Cities. BioScience.
DOI: 10.1093/biosci/biw002
Metson, G.S., S.M. Powers, R. Hale, J. Sayles, G. Oberg,
G.K, MacDonald, Y. Yuwayyama, N. Springer, A. Weatherley, K. Hondula, K. Jones,
R.B. Chowdhury, A.H.W. Beusen, A.F. Bouwman. Socio-environmental assessment of
phosphorus flows in the urban sanitation shain of diverse cities. Regional Environmental Change, under review
Muñoz-Erickson, T.A., C. Miller, and T. Miller. (2017). How
cities think: knowledge co-production for urban sustainability and
resilience. Forests. 8 (6) DOI:
10.3390/f8060203
Muñoz-Erickson, T.A., Lindsay K. Campbell, Daniel L.
Childers, J. Morgan Grove, David M. Iwaniec, Steward T. A. Pickett, Michele
Romolini, Erika S. Svendsen. (2016). Demystifying governance and its role in
transitions in urban social-ecological systems.
Ecosphere. 7 (11), e01564. DOI:
10.1002/ecs2.1564
Pickett, S.T.A. and Weiqi Zhou (2015). Global Urbanization
as a Shifting Context for Applying Ecological Science toward the Sustainable
City. Ecosystem Health and
Sustainability. 1 art5. DOI:
10.1890/EHS14-0014.1
Pickett, S.T.A., M.L. Cadenasso, Emma J. Rosi-Marshall,
Kenneth T. Belt, Peter M. Groffman, J. Morgan Grove, Elena G. Irwin, Sujay S.
Kaushal, Shannon L. LaDeau, Charles H. Nilon, Christopher M. Swan, Paige S.
Warren. (2017). Dynamic Heterogeneity: A Framework to Promote Integration and
Hypothesis Generation in Urban Systems..
Urban Ecosystems. 20 (1), DOI: 10.1007/s11252-016-0574-9
Pickett, S.T.A., M.L. Cadenasso (2017). How many principles
of urban ecology are there? Landscape
Ecology. DOI: 10.1007/s10980-017-0492-0
Pickett, S.T.A., M.L. Cadenasso, Daniel Childers, Mark
McDonnell, Weiqi Zhou (2016). Evolution and future of urban ecological science:
Ecology in, of, and for the city.
Ecosystem Health and Sustainability.
DOI: 10.1002/ehs2.1229
Pieranunzi, D., F.R. Steiner, and S. Rieff (2017). Advancing
green infrastructure and ecosystem services through SITES. Landscape Architecture Frontiers. 5 (1), 22. DOI:
10.15302/J-LAF-20170103
Romolini, M., R.P. Bixler, and J.M. Grove. (2016). A
social-ecological framework for urban strewarship network research to promote
sustainable and resilient cities. Sustainability.
8:956. DOI: 10.3390/su8090956
Sanchez, CA; Childers, DL; Turnbull, L; Upham, RF; Weller, N
(2016). Aridland constructed treatment wetlands II: Plant mediation of surface
hydrology enhances nitrogen removal.
Ecological Engineering. 97 658. DOI:
10.1016/j.ecoleng.2016.01.002
Shutters, S.T. (2016). Interdependent Preferences and
Prospects for Global Sustainability.
International Journal of Sustainability Policy and Practice. 12
(3), DOI: 10.18848/2325-1166/CGP
Steiner, F.R. (2016). Opportunities for Urban Ecology in
Community and Regional Planning. Journal
of Urban Ecology. 2 (1), DOI: 10.1093/jue/juv004
Steiner, F.R. (2016). The application of ecological
knowledge requires a pursuit of wisdom.
Landscape and Urban Planning. 155:108.
Steiner, FR, AW Shearer (2016). Geodesign-Changing the
World, Changing Design. Landscape and
Urban Planning. 156:1.
Zhou, Weiqi, S.T.A. Pickett, and M.L. Cadenasso (2017). Shifting concepts of urban spatial heterogeneity and their implications for sustainability. Landscape Ecology. 32 (1), DOI: 10.1007/s10980-016-0432-4
Steward T.A. Pickett, Director Emeritus
