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.

Community Awareness and Field Safety Training

Every year, about this time, the Baltimore Ecosystem Study hosts its Community Awareness and Field Safety training.  We expect that every new participant in BES, whether student or senior professor, participate in this event the first year they become part of the project.  Why do we ask this of the members of a scientific research and education project?

Safety

Christine Rega sampling soil carbon flux.

First, the safety part.  Every researcher has to be trained in safety.  Of course this satisfies formal regulations to train people in procedures to avoid accidents in the field or laboratory.  But more fundamentally, it is important for everybody to know what to do to avoid problems, and what to do if some problem occurs.  Chemical safety, what fire extinguisher to use for what type of fuel, how to deal with spills, and a long list of other important information needs to be in mind when one enters a scientific workplace.  And in the field, how to minimize the risks of exposure to lime disease ticks, or poison ivy, or how to avoid heat stroke, and another long list of issues to be aware of.  The rule not to be out in the field alone, whether it is a primeval forest, a stream sampling station, or a city neighborhood, is an important piece of advice for all researchers, for example.  BES has developed a good bit of wisdom about the cautions and responses to enhance safety in the field, focusing on the particular dimensions of an urban ecosystem. 

Community Awareness

Baltimore City neighborhoods

The other half of the event -- Community Awareness -- is equally important.  Furthermore, it is the aspect of working in an urban system that is likely not to be a part of traditional scientific training.  It is crucial for success of BES research and education because we are both figuratively and literally working in people's back yards, and on their streets, and in their school yards, parks, gardens, and farms.  Basically, we are working in their neighborhoods.  Taking this seriously is one reason that "engagement," rather than "outreach" is one of the missions of BES.  Community awareness promotes the respectful and productive engagement required to work effectively -- and safely -- in the extraordinarily diverse set of neighborhoods and sites that make up the Baltimore urban ecosystem.  For example, by some counts, Baltimore city alone has some 275 recognized neighborhoods.  Each has its own leaders, issues, layout, amenities, strengths, and vulnerabilities.  Each one has people who care deeply about it, and who keep an eye out for unusual activities or unknown persons.  BES researchers and educators -- as quests in all these places -- need to know when they are cross into a different neighborhood, who are the "gatekeepers" there, what their concerns and interests relevant to science are, and much more.  And there is advice from decades of experience -- take off your sunglasses, be pleasant, greet people respectfully, take time to let them know what you are doing.  Although these are "costs" of doing research in urban ecosystems, they are also rewarding because it can put science in a new light for new audiences.  And of course there is the simple pleasure of sharing with new people of many backgrounds.

Unexpected Benefits

The Community Awareness and Field Safety Training is important -- and required.  It is one practical introduction to the complexities of social-ecological research and engagement with residents and leaders at all levels that make the decisions that determine so much of what constitutes Baltimore's ecology.

Further Reading

For members of the BES community, the manual is online at http://beslter.org/internal/Guidance-Policies-Safety-BES-Facilities-Manual-2014.pdf  You'll need your BES password to get this.

The Community Awareness and Safety Training is organized on behalf of BES by the Parks & People Foundation, a key participating organization in the project.

Urban Ecology Takes a Long Time

We are extraordinarily fortunate in Baltimore to have long-term support for our urban social-ecological research and engagement.  BES is funded in 6 year increments, subject to review and approval by the National Science Foundation's rigorous peer driven process.  It is very likely that our ability to contribute substantially to the consolidation and progress of modern American urban ecological science is a result of the long-term funding we have had since 1997.  But what is it about longevity that pays off so greatly in an academic and practical program?

Most obviously, given the participation of BES in the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) network supported by the US National Science Foundation, the big value is contributing data sets on long-lasting social and ecological processes and patterns.  Many biophysical processes can take long times to play out.  Change in the composition and structure of vegetation in yards, on streets, and in parks, the development of urban soils, the invasion or extirpation of animal populations, the periodic occurrence of physical disturbances or extreme climatic events, for example, all take long times to observe.  Historical data and simulation modeling can extend the understanding of these slow, episodic processes, of course, and these methods are commonly used in our and other LTER projects.  But another kind of process is both common in urban systems, and takes a long time to occur: Complex events, those that involve multiple causes which occur at different time and spatial scales; those whose interactions are not constant or instantaneous, but rather are lagged or sometimes indirect; and those which reflect rare or unique social or biophysical triggers.  It takes long-term data records to expose all these kinds of changes.  And urban systems are full of these kinds of changes.

There are less obvious reasons to rely on long-term research and engagement, however.  The most important of these is the long time it takes to build social relationships of trust.  This phenomenon characterizes the working relationships within the scientific research team, and the relationships of the members of the research program with an incredible array of people and institutions in the region.  BES as a program and as a collection of individuals requires the trust of residents of communities where we work and install instrumentation, community groups, non-governmental organizations, and government agencies at city, state, and federal levels.  The list of groups in each of these categories is immense.  For example, just to name some of the agencies in the city of Baltimore, we work with the school system, the Office of Sustainability, and the departments of Public Works, Planning, Recreation and Parks, Health, and Housing, among others.  Other counties in the metropolitan region, plus state agencies are equally numerous.  It takes time to build trust between our researchers and educators and all these various constituencies.  Demonstrating good will, a learning attitude, the appropriate level of accountability and responsiveness, and just plain old politeness, are among the cultural attributes that must be built and maintained over time.  Such building rests on a growing number of interactions, and is always vulnerable to missteps and gaffes.  So sometimes there is also the time required for making amends.  Culture is, in other words, a long-term phenomenon.

Alimatou Seck's (L) research has helped local water managers.

Part of the outward-facing value of longevity is the ability to provide information, insights, and support for the local constituencies.  It takes a long time to absorb the needs of communities and other constituencies, and to develop, analyze, and interpret data sets that address those needs.  Continued dialog, with a healthy respect for listening, is the mechanism supporting the growth of this kind of long-term social capital.

Within the project, we have discovered that it takes a long time to build, reinforce, and refine the relationships among members representing different academic disciplines, different career stages, different degrees of theoretical versus practical motivation, and the like.  Underlying many of these kinds of long-term growth is an appreciation of the different terminologies, theoretical structures, and research methodologies that different groups employ.  Bridging this variety of gaps is made difficult by the fact that often the same words are used to represent different practical motivations, and different (but rarely states) theoretical assumptions and mental models.  Besides goodwill among disciplines, it simply takes a long time to become aware of the gaps and to jointly construct conceptual and practical bridges across them.  I have sometimes been surprised to discover that I, as a biophysical researcher, was using the same term as some social scientists were, but using it in a very different way.  Productive surprise and recovery from surprise take time.

So the long-term aspect of our project is very rich.  It resides in the fundamentally long-lasting processes of social-ecological change and interaction; the growth of trust and social capital as participants in the Baltimore social-ecological system, and the blossoming of mutual understanding within an amazingly diverse community of scholars, researchers, and educators.  Urban ecology just takes a long time.