What Do People Value About BES?

The 2018 twentieth annual meeting of BES participants, institutional partners, and interested citizens, provided an opportunity to ask people what they thought the most important finding or contribution of BES had been over those 20 years.  We were expecting suggestions that suggested specific results, or particular educational contributions.  We were surprised by the results.

First, we should note that the survey was informal and far from sociologically rigorous.  Although we handed out response cards to the more than 110 people registered at the meeting, we only received 15 returns.  Maybe not a bad rate given the usual percentage that even formal surveys achieve.  But that number is a caveat here.

So what did we learn?  The majority said that the most important contribution was BES itself as an intellectual network and community of practice aimed at advancing urban ecological science and its application.  This suggests that people value the opportunities for collaboration, data sharing, mutual encouragement, and fellowship with scholars and activists concerned with the city as a socially relevant system.  Of course, these last suggestions are our guesses, and maybe we'll generate a more formal survey for the 2019 annual meeting to identify the particular things that people value.

Participants in the 2016 BES Graduate Symposium.

But in the meantime, we are pleased that our longstanding concern with a culture of openness, inclusiveness, and focus on the Baltimore region as an environment and as a home has paid off.  An integrative, inviting culture can be both a goal and an outcome.

Steward Pickett, Director Emeritus

Some relevant BES papers:

Pickett, S. T. A. 1999. The culture of synthesis: habits of mind in novel ecological integration. Oikos 87:479–487.

Pickett, S. T. A., W. R. Burch, and J. M. Grove. 1999. Interdisciplinary research: Maintaining the constructive impulse in a culture of criticism. Ecosystems 2:302–307.

October is BES Annual Meeting Season

In America we seem to follow a regular rhythm of holidays signaled by changing displays to encourage seasonally linked consumption.   So as Halloween decorations begin to appear in stores, and on front stoops, it can only mean that BES Annual Meeting Season is around the corner.  And so it is.  This year there are three related events, the Annual Meeting, the BES Open House, and the celebration of the art exhibit "Watershed Moments: Art and the Baltimore Ecosystem Study."  Here is an overview of these events.

www.flickr.com/photos/lars_o_matic/15700425596

 

BES Annual Meeting

The BES Annual Meeting is designed to share the technical scientific results of the project with BES researchers, educators, local, state and federal agency representatives while also being open to the media, and interested community members.

Location: The 17th BES Annual Meeting will be held at the Cylburn Arboretum Vollmer Visitor Center at 4915 Greenspring Avenue, Baltimore, MD, 21209. 

Schedule:

Tuesday, October 20: The Annual Meeting will start at 8:50 with introductory remarks followed at 9:00 by our keynote speaker, Ann M. Bartuska, PhD, Deputy Under Secretary for Research, Education and Economics, USDA.  Talks will follow our keynote and a poster lightening round just before lunch.  After lunch there will be a poster session followed by afternoon talks. 

Wednesday, October 21: The Annual Meeting will start with talks at 9:00 am ending approximately at noon.

Breakfast (for those who have pre-paid) and coffee will be available at 8:30 am both days.

Registration is at  http://beslter.org/bes_am_asp_2015/bes_am_reg.html

BES Open House

This year the BES Open House will be a different event than it has been in the past.  We will be focusing on BES and our relationship with City, County and State agencies, NGOs, media and community members.  The BES Open House will be an opportunity for us to showcase our research through posters, photos and in-person discussion between BES researchers and our invitees.  This change was initiated by Parks & People Foundation, our BES partner in community relations and connections.  Now that they have moved into their new space they would like the BES Open House to focus on the BES research activity in the Baltimore region.  Previously, the BES Open House & Greening Celebration included a celebration of community gardens with awards given to citizens who worked together to grow gardens throughout the City.  The greening celebration will now be a separate event held in the Spring.

Location: the Parks & People Foundation’s new Sally & Butch Michel Center, 2100 Liberty Heights Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21217.

Schedule: The BES Open House will follow the Annual Meeting on Tuesday evening 20 October from 5:30 to 7:30 pm.

Reception and Art Exhibit

Another added bonus is that our Artist-in-Residence, Helen Glazer and the BES Arts Committee have put together an exhibit entitled, “Watershed Moments: Art and the Baltimore Ecosystem Study” which is being held October 3-30.  A reception, open to the public, takes place Wednesday, October 21 from 5:30 to 8:00 p.m., with a gallery talk by artist Helen Glazer and researchers Dawn Biehler and Steward Pickett at 6:30 p.m.

Location: Space Camp, 16 W. North Avenue, Baltimore, MD.

Reception Schedule: Wednesday, October 21 from 5:30 to 8:00 p.m.; gallery talk at 6:30 p.m.

A Successful 2012 BES Annual Meeting

BES has just concluded a very successful Annual Meeting.  This was the 14th annual meeting and it had two components.  First was a Steering Committee meeting on Tuesday 23 October.  This meeting, as is our tradition, was open to all members and collaborators of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) project.  This committee of the whole helps us plan the Quarterly Project Meetings for the coming year, and work on both intellectual synthesis and practical management and policy issues.  The meeting took four hours, which is typical for this important project wide activity.

Planning for the Mid Term Review

During this session, we worked on plans for the Mid-Term review by a visiting committee to be organized by the National Science Foundation’s LTER program.  We alerted all members of the project that next year’s Annual Meeting will overlap with the visit of the Mid-Term Review Committee.  This is being done in order to permit maximum participation by BES members, including PIs, Post-docs, graduate students, program coordinators, project staff, and collaborators.  We are embarking on a year of activities to prepare this broad constituency for effective interaction with the Mid-Term Review Committee. 

The 2013 Quarterly Project Meetings

As a part of the preparation for the Mid-Term Review, our Quarterly Project Meetings were scheduled and scoped.  We will focus the three meetings leading up to the 2013 Annual Meeting/Mid-Term Review on the overarching conceptual framework and integrative tools of BES.  So each meeting will discuss and deepen our understanding of the concepts of sustainability, resilience, adaptive processes, and pulse-press feedbacks.  In addition, each meeting will focus on one of the three new integrative theoretical areas: 1) the urban stream dis/continuum, 2) the metacommunity concept in the urban setting, and 3) the theory of locational choice by households and firms.  We will prepare summary and overview documents to help folks prepare for the meetings.

Image courtesy Brian McGrath,
Parsons The New School for Design

Two of the Quarterly Meetings will be extended for additional time in order to allow us to develop the new initiative of science and the arts in BES, and to update our ongoing activities in education.  The schedule of the Quarterly Project Meetings will be posted soon in the BES news:  http://bes-news.blogspot.com/.

The Steering Committee Meeting also afforded us the opportunity to advance plans for our synthesis volume.  This edited book will summarize the conceptual foundations and the important finding of BES over its 15 year history.  In addition, it will provide the opportunity to highlight our new theoretical themes, and to look forward as BES moves to understand the transition from the sanitary to the sustainable city.

Sharing Results and Outcomes

The second main component of the Annual Meeting comprised our technical presentations of results and research or project plans.  This was introduced by a keynote talk by Professor Sherry Olson from McGill University.  The themes that she highlighted were the cycles of growth in cities, and their relationships to the flows of energy and matter.  This is a potential area in which the work of BES could be enhanced. Members of BES then presented an exciting series of 26 talks and 17 posters.  The abstracts are available here http://beslter.org/meeting-abstracts/2012/frame7-page_18.html.  Senior PIs, graduate students and postdocs, and advanced undergraduates reported on their work.  Notable was how commonly a speaker noted the work of colleagues, both within and across disciplines.  Furthermore, examples of connections to our new theoretical themes appeared through the meeting.

In addition to being scientifically sound and practically significant, the presentations were of high quality.  Most talks followed best practices: good contrast between text and background, heavy lines defining graphs, and relatively little extraneous framing or graphical decoration.  The vast majority of speakers kept to the 12-minute target for their talks, leaving a short interval for questions and for introduction by the moderator. 

A New Way to Engage Posters

The poster session was scheduled after lunch, and was designed to give adequate attention to this medium.  To engage the participants in the poster session, we opened the poster session with a lightning round in which each poster was introduced by its author in a few sentences while the poster was projected on the screen.  The intent was not to read the poster, but to associate the poster with the author so that meeting participants could easily choose the posters they wanted to be sure not to miss.  We will use this method in the future as well.

BES and the Arts and the Annual Meeting

The first official BES Artist-In-Residence, Lynn Cazabon, exhibited several of the photographs from her “Uncultivated” portfolio.  These striking photographs graced the grand stairway hall of the Vollmer Center and the Cylburn Arboretum.  Their theme, volunteer plants in the city, resonated with the scientific and educational messages of BES that the city-suburb-exurb matrix is an ecosystem, in which both the built and the natural intermingle.  Mark Twery, Chair of the BES Science and Arts Committee presented an overview of activities and plans that this new committee is discussing.

Celebrating and Fellowship

Undoubtedly the most fun part of the annual meeting was the Community Greening Celebration and the BES Open House, held on Wednesday evening.  Music and refreshment accompanied the acknowledgement by the Parks & People Foundation of community groups that had performed exemplary greening and revitalization efforts in the city over the previous year.  This was an excellent opportunity to meet and converse with members of the communities in which our work takes place.

Thanks

The series of formal, technical, informal, and fun activities are a highlight of the BES year.  Thanks to Project Facilitator Holly Beyar, Program Chair Morgan Grove, and Information Manager Jonathan Walsh for their contributions to the success of these meetings.  Thanks to those who presented their results and activities, and for doing so in clear and engaging ways.

The 2012 BES Annual Meeting

A Chance to Gather

Vollmer Center, site of BES' 2012 Annual Meeting

Every year near toward the end of October, the Baltimore Ecosystem Study Long-Term Ecological Research community meets to share results, insights, and accomplishments, as well as to look forward to the next year's activities.  Everybody who has an interest in our research, education, and community engagement is invited to attend.   Registration will be available on the BES Homepage.  This helps us keep track of attendance, and to collect the modest fees to cover the costs of lunch and a light breakfast.  There are several notable features of this year's Annual Meeting.

Keynote by Prof Sherry Olson
First, we are privileged to have Sherry Olson as our keynote speaker this year.  Prof. Olson is author of a classic book on Baltimore as well as other important works on urban geography and history.  As detailed in an earlier post (http://besdirector.blogspot.com/2012/08/bes-book-of-year-baltimore-building-of.html), she will talk about "The Growth Machine: Its Environmental Legacy."  This talk should put us in the mind for synthesis, which is one of the goals of our annual interactions as an inclusive community.

A Chance to Link Science and Art
This year's Annual Meeting will also feature a photography exhibit by Lynn Cazabon (http://besdirector.blogspot.com/2012/08/lynn-cazabon-bess-first-artist-in.html).  She is BES's first official Artist-In-Residence.  Building upon the success of our earlier connections with artists, BES is establishing a tradition to connect art and science.  Attendees at this year's meeting will be treated to a display of photographs from Lynn's widely known and acknowledged work.

Gearing Up for the Mid-Term Review
Midway through each six-year funding cycle, the National Science Foundation conducts an external review of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study LTER.  All LTER projects undergo this rigorous external evaluation to determine whether they are on track with the research, educational, and outreach commitments they made in their grant proposals.  These reviews also help each project prepare for its next full grant proposal to NSF.

Our mid-term review for this grant cycle will take place in October next year.  In order to make this most convenient for BES members, and to ensure a broad participation of our community, the mid-term review will overlap with part of the Annual Meeting in 2013.  Because of this, it is important for all members of the BES community to understand the mid-term review process, and to learn how to prepare to best articulate their role and contributions to the mission of BES.

Part of our preparation will be to outline the book that BES will design to synthesize what by then will be 15 years of integrated urban socio-ecological research, educational research and programs, and interaction with communities and decision leaders in the Baltimore region.  The Annual Meeting will be a chance to inform all members of BES about the plans for this book, and to be sure that all who wish to contribute have a pathway to do so.

Celebrate the Community

Lady Baltimore Statue at Cylburn

For many years now our meetings have also been associated with Parks & People Foundation's Community Greening Celebration.  This adds the dimension of interacting with individuals and groups that have made substantial improvements in Baltimore's environment and neighborhoods.  An awards ceremony, distinguished guests, food, and music are part of this celebration of the achievements of our neighbors and partners.

A Charm City Venue
Our meeting will take place at the Vollmer Center, nestled in the City's beautiful Cylburn Arboretum.  This location has been a hit with BES Annual Meeting attendees in the past. During breaks, join your firends and colleagues for walks on the many trails through the woods and gardens overlooking the Jones Falls Valley.  See you there!

Lynn Cazabon: BES's First Artist-In-Residence

Photographer and member of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County faculty, Lynn Cazabon is the first official Artist-In-Residence at the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, Long-Term Ecological Research program.  She began her contribution to the BES community by presenting a lecture on her ongoing project "Uncultivated" at the 2011 Annual Meeting. This year of artistic residency will culminate with an exhibit of her work during the BES Annual Meeting from 24-25 October, 2012.  This meeting will take place at Cylburn Arboretum, and all members, partners, and collaborators of BES are invited to attend. 

"Uncultivated"

Of particular relevance to BES, "Uncultivated" takes as its subject wild plants that thrive in urban environments and has been disseminated via public displays on billboards and transit shelters. The full project can be viewed at http://uncultivated.info.  Her thought provoking and creative images of Baltimore’s volunteer flora stimulated the awareness of the public about the often unappreciated plants around them, and how they fit into the metropolis.  Lynn's work has been exhibited widely in the United States and abroad. Examples of her other projects can be viewed at her website: http://lynncazabon.com.

A Deepening Commitment to Art

BES first involved artists two years ago, when the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange performed at the annual meeting and the community open house, as well as presented a talk on their work.  The stimulation of creativity and interpretive power of art for scientific concepts and subjects has become clear to us as a result of that effort and interactions since them.  BES has been exploring how to facilitate and institutionalize connections between artists of all sorts and the scientific and educational work of the project.  A committee comprising scientists, educators, and artists has helped to shape a vision for continued interaction between our scholarship, community engagement, and the arts.  This committee, chaired by Dr. Mark Twery, has designed an Artist-In-Residence program.  We will be posting more information on how to apply for a one year residency in the near future.

Exhibit at BES Annual Meeting

Meanwhile, check out Uncultivated on line, and join us at the Annual Meeting to celebrate the connection between science and art as embodied in Lynn Cazabon’s powerful images.  Her work is a great example of how science can benefit from art.  We are delighted that Lynn will donate the use of one of her photographs to BES.

(See an earlier Director's Corner post http://besdirector.blogspot.com/2011/04/does-science-need-art.html for Background on BES and art.)

BES Book of the Year -- Baltimore: The Building of an American City

We have started a new tradition at BES.  A book of the year is a good way to focus on some important publication relevant to everyone in the Baltimore Ecosystem Study.  We start this tradition with a classic and fundamental book about the history and development of Baltimore: Professor Sherry H. Olson’s Baltimore: The Building of an American City.  Although first published in 1980, and updated in 1997, it remains a key intellectual resource on Baltimore.  Prof. Olson was on the faculty at Johns Hopkins University at the time the book was first written.  She has since moved to McGill University in Montreal, Quebec.

By highlighting this book, we hope that all members of the BES community will read this important work.  Some of course, will be returning to it as a refresher.  The book will surely repay their effort, given the plethora of details and explanations of the trajectory of change in Baltimore.  Those who are new to Prof. Olson’s book are in for a treat, because it is not only comprehensive, but engagingly written.

Our spotlight on this book will also shine on Prof. Olson herself, as she will give the keynote presentation at our Annual Meeting at the Cylburn Arboretum on 24 October, 2012.  Entitled "The Growth Machine: Its Environmental Legacy," this talk will give a chance for her to bring us up to date on her research and scholarship.  All members of the BES community are invited to delve into the book, and to hear Prof. Olson at our Annual Meeting.

See her web page for more on her research interests and publications: http://www.geog.mcgill.ca/faculty/olson/

The Year of Adaptive Processes

The new theme for research in BES emphasizes adaptive processes as a key to understanding and working with urban sustainability.  Because of its importance, the intellectual theme for BES this year will be socio-ecological adaptive processes.

From Sanitary to Sustainable: The Guiding Idea

To review a bit, BES III takes the transformation from the sanitary to the sustainable city as a major ongoing environmental shift that has the potential to affect all aspects of the city-suburban-exurban system of Baltimore.  Sustainability is a socially agreed upon set of goals that accounts for environmental, social, and economic health of the total urban ecosystem.  It necessarily incorporates social values.  

The Science Supporting Sustainability

But what scientific information is needed to advance sustainability, and to evaluate the degree of success in achieving sustainability?  The concept of resilience, which is both a powerful metaphor of change and adjustment is the next link in the intellectual path to understanding and working with sustainability.  Resilience, as mentioned earlier in this Web Log (http://besdirector.blogspot.com/2011/01/resilience-ecology-evolution-and.html) is the ability of a system to experience internal and external shocks and still adjust and persist in a dynamic form.  Resilience can have socially desirable and socially undesirable outcomes, and that is judged against the three-pronged sustainability goals chosen.  The system of automobile based transport in metropolitan America is resilient, but in some ways, an environmentally unfortunate one.  Wetlands are a resilient aspect of coastal systems affected by hurricanes and storm surges.  Resilience per se is neither good nor bad.  Sustainability, when the goals are well chosen, may admittedly involve trade offs, but at least those trade offs must not neglect off hand such things as social equity and ecological function.

Making Resilience Work

Figure 1: The Adaptive Cycle

Resilience is on the one hand, a metaphorical conception, and on the other a very general theoretical framework cast in the form of the “adaptive cycle” (Figure 1).  How does such a general concept get translated into something that can be measured and tracked?  The answer is to use adaptive processes to fill in the details of how systems develop, how they react to stresses and disturbances, and how they periodically reorganize.

Resilience Depends on Adaptation

What are adaptive processes?  They are the structures, fluxes, and interactions that allow systems to adjust to sudden or gradual changes.  Social and biogeophysical features can contribute to the adaptive capacity of urban systems.  The literature suggests a number of general kinds of adaptive processes (Figure 2).  It is these features which BES needs to concentrate on in the coming year.  How do our ongoing, long-term measurements support the scheme of adaptive processes?  What kinds of trends can be determined and can they be interpreted in terms of the resilience cycle and socially described sustainability goals?  What new measurements or analyses might be required?  Are there clear parallels between various social and biophysical adaptive processes?

Figure 2. The determinants of adaptive capacity, shown as adaptive processes in social and biophysical realms.  Of course the processes in the two realms interact.

Toward Improved Understanding of Adaptive Processes

Over the coming year, discussion of adaptive processes should suffuse all our activities and research discussions.  Then, during our annual meeting in October, we may be in a better position to evaluate the state of adaptive processes, and to understand how they affect the transition from the sanitary to the sustainable city.  Addressing this issue will undoubtedly take a long time.  It’s a good time to start.

Adaptive Explanations in Cities

Cities are hard to explain, no doubt.  Within and between cities, social capital, historical contingency, economic resources, and the deployment of power are well known explanatory variables.  One kind of explanatory process, however, has been notably absent from the roster of possibilities in urban socio-ecological research.  Surprisingly, that missing element is one of the most fundamental explanatory tools of modern biology and ecology – the adaptation of social organisms as groups.  The application of the principles of natural selection (Box 1) to social groups may also have a role in understanding the social structure of cities and urban agglomerations, and hence the effects of social groups and neighborhoods on environmental processes.

Prof. David Sloan Wilson 

This lapse is being corrected by the scholarly and practical efforts of Professor David Sloan Wilson, of Binghamton University, a part of the State University of New York system.  Prof. Wilson is one of the world’s leading evolutionary ecologists.  He has studied the adaptation of groups of organisms in both model and actual situations for decades.  Although some biologists find adaptation of groups to be problematical, preferring to leave adaptive explanations at the nexus of individuals and the populations they constitute, the weight of models and experimental outcomes has convinced many, including myself, that this kind of explanation has great power and legitimacy.  The emergence of altruism against the seemingly unassailable momentum of individual benefit has required forceful explanatory tools.  Groups that exhibit greater altruism and cohesion are expected to be more successful than those which do not promote group benefit.

Can this explanatory hypothesis apply to cities?  Prof. Wilson and colleagues are investigating this possibility by comparing various opportunities for “prosociality”[i] in Binghamton, NY.  In BES, we might refer to social capital or neighborhood cohesion as related concepts.  The arenas in which prosociality is being examined in Binghamton range from the reward systems in high school classes, to the willingness of persons in different neighborhoods to do good deeds for strangers.  A recent article in the journal, Nature (http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110608/full/474146a.html) has summarized in very engaging and clear terms the concepts and the many community-based activities that Prof. Wilson is employing in Binghamton.  His work is aimed at understanding the social structure of this post-industrial, upstate New York State city, but he and his colleagues are also engaged in activities aimed at improving the quality of life for the 47,000 residents in their many neighborhoods.

At the BES annual meeting, which takes place on 19-20 October 2011, Prof. Wilson will deliver the keynote address.  This will give us a chance to think about how the hypothesis of adaptive altruism of groups can be applied and tested in Baltimore.  For background on Prof. Wilson and his exciting work with Binghamton communities, see not only the piece in Nature referenced above, but also his own Web Log (http://scienceblogs.com/evolution/) and that of the Binghamton Neighborhood Project (http://bnp.binghamton.edu/).

I’m excited to explore how an adaptive model and the hypotheses it generates can help us better understand and promote the connection of science and society, and the prospect of people's well being in the Baltimore region.

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[i] Prosocial - Beneficial to all parties and consistent with community laws and mores; Contributing to a beneficial outcome by negotiation, problem solving, problem analysis, clarification, or respectful behaviors (en.wiktionary.org/wiki/prosocial).

 The photograph of Prof. Wilson is from http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/