National Science Foundation Conducting a 40 year review of the LTER network: BES Contributions

To prepare for the National Science Foundation's upcoming review of the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) network, each LTER site was asked to submit a 2 page “self-study.” Below we provide the BES LTER self study that we submitted to the LTER Network office. We are sharing this short self study here in the Balto Brief to provide our community with a way to learn more about our site, in brief. Obviously, this short document can not provide the depth and breadth of research conducted by the BES LTER over the past 20 years. We hope this short document inspires people to learn more about our LTER site.

Program description

The Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES) began in 1998 with three questions to advance the understanding of urban areas as a novel and increasingly important ecosystem type: 1) Structure: What is the spatial and temporal patch structure of ecological, physical, and socio-economic factors in the urban ecosystem? 2) Function: What are the fluxes of energy, matter, and populations in patches of the urban ecosystem? 3) People: What are the choices people and their organizations make that affect the urban ecosystem? Since its inception, BES has focused on three focal process areas: watershed biogeochemistry, ecological communities and sentinel species, and human environmental perceptions and behaviors. The project has pioneered new theory and methods for characterizing urban ecosystems, established long-term (perhaps the longest in the world) urban watershed hydrology and biogeochemistry datasets, developed and applied novel long-term urban social survey instruments and characterized long-term changes in multiple dimensions (plants, birds, soil fauna) of urban biodiversity. BES educators and scientists work directly with students and schools in Baltimore to help bring science into the classroom and with government agencies, non-governmental organizations, communities and neighborhoods to use results from BES research to improve environmental quality and human health and well-being across the City.

Photo by Brad Neathery on Unsplash

Key Site-based findings and products 2008-2018 (Parenthetical citations listed at end of post.)

• BES has developed new theory (2) and methods (5) for characterizing the multidimensional, multidisciplinary nature of urban ecosystems. These efforts have facilitated analyses of urban ecosystems across the globe and the development of a new “urban systems science” that is a key component of emerging sustainability science across the globe (7).
•  BES watershed research has shown that nutrient cycling and retention in urban watersheds are driven by complex dynamics, with surprisingly high nitrogen retention, climate sensitivity and surface water:groundwater interactions (1, 8). These studies have been a platform for novel analyses of the ecosystem effects of emerging contaminants (10).
• BES has helped challenge the assumption that urban biodiversity is low, replacing it with a realization that biological communities in urban environments are diverse and dynamic, with significant effects on fluxes of water, energy, carbon and nutrients and human well-being (6, 9, 4).
• The BES Household Telephone Survey has provided novel information on environmental knowledge, perceptions, values, and behaviors; how these influence ecosystem structure and function; and how changes in ecosystem structure and function may affect people's physical activity, social cohesion, perception of neighborhood desirability, and willingness to relocate (3).

Selected cross-site or broader syntheses (2008-2018)

Our sibling urban LTER program in Phoenix (CAP) and BES have a long history of collaboration. Coordinated data collection (telephone survey, plant diversity, soil processes, microclimate, hydrography, plant and soil C and isotopes) was (and is continuing) done as part of two projects funded by the NSF Macrosystems Biology program on “urban homogenization.” This work emerged directly from our cross-site collaborations and discussions, has produced a series of direct comparisons between Baltimore and Phoenix as well as comparisons with four other cities including Boston, Miami, Minneapolis-St. Paul and Los Angeles (6). More generally, BES and CAP both employ “200 point surveys” for collection of data across the urban ecosystem and these platforms facilitate comparisons between our two LTER sites.

Broader impacts, education, and outreach (2008-2018)

Since 2009, we have worked with 135 teachers in Baltimore in a variety of education programs including the Pathways to Environmental Science Literacy project in partnership with LTER sites in California, Colorado, and Michigan. Outcomes included 1) reaching thousands of students in the Baltimore City (ca. 80% African American, 10% Latino/a, and 9% white) and Baltimore County Public Schools (ca. 7% Asian, 39% African American, 10% Hispanic, 39% White, and 5% Two or More Races 5%), 2) research about teaching and student learning, and 3) curricular modules on carbon, water, biodiversity, and citizenship.

Downtown Baltimore from the Washington Monument

Data stewardship and sharing

BES watershed data are the focus of outreach work with local municipalities grappling with water quality regulations (Total Maximum Daily Load) for the Chesapeake Bay through the Baltimore Urban Waters Partnership and our data and physical sample archive have attracted new investigators to pursue new analyses. Our core long-term data sets on trace gases (8), telephone survey and biodiversity have facilitated development of cross-site analysis (8) and the emergence of research on urban homogenization (6).

Investigators

From 2008 to 2018, BES engaged numerous participants.  During this decade there were 92 investigators, 162 graduate students, 199 undergraduate students, 15 postdoctoral researchers, 6 education staff members, and 413 interested parties.

Partnerships and shared funding

The USDA Forest Service’s Baltimore Urban Field Station is fundamental to BES. Related research, education and outreach projects, and analysis of BES data are greatly facilitated by the Forest Service collaboration. The Baltimore Field Station is located on the campus of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) and includes 7 full time equivalents (FTEs), 9 offices for permanent staff and 4 “as-needed” spaces, two conference rooms, one field supply storage area and two field vehicles (van and pickup truck). The Forest Service works regionally and nationally, with other scientists and staff located at other locations who also work in Baltimore on BES related projects. The USDA Forest Service estimates a contribution of ~$1.1 / year to BES.

Data uplink from the Carroll Park BES/USGS stream gauge.

Top ten products of the past decade

1.    Bettez et al. 2015. Climate variation overwhelms efforts to reduce nitrogen delivery to coastal waters. Ecosystems 18:1319-1331. DOI: 10.1007/s10021-015-9902-9

2.    Grove et al. 2015. The Baltimore School of Urban Ecology: Space, Scale, and Time for the Study of Cities. Yale University Press, New Haven.

3.    Hager et al. 2013. Socio-ecological revitalization of an urban watershed. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 11:28-36. DOI: 10.1890/120069

4.    Swan et al. 2017. Differential organization of taxonomic and functional diversity in an urban woody plant metacommunity. Applied Vegetation Science 20:7-17 DOI: 10.1111/avsc.12266

5.    Pickett, S. T. A., M. L. Cadenasso, E. J. Rosi-Marshall, K. T. Belt, P. M. Groffman, J. M. Grove, E. G. Irwin, S. S. Kaushal, S. L. LaDeau, C. H. Nilon, C. M. Swan, and P. S. Warren. 2017. Dynamic heterogeneity: a framework to promote ecological integration and hypothesis generation in urban systems. Urban Ecosystems 20:1-14. DOI: 10.1007/s11252-016-0574-9

6.    Groffman, P. M., M. Avolio, J. Cavender-Bares, N. D. Bettez, J. M. Grove, S. Hall, S. E. Hobbie, K. L. Larson, S. B. Lerman, D. H. Locke, J. B. Heffernan, J. L. Morse, C. Neill, K. C. Nelson, J. O'Neil-Dunne, D. E. Pataki, C. Polsky, R. V. Pouyat, R. Roy Chowdhury, M. Steele, and T. L. E. Trammel. 2017a. Ecological homogenization of residential macrosystems. Nature Ecology and Evolution 2017:article 0191. DOI: 10.1038/s41559-017-0191

7.    Groffman, P. M., M. L. Cadenasso, J. Cavender-Bares, D. L. Childers, N. B. Grimm, J. M. Grove, S. E. Hobbie, L. R. Hutyra, D. G. Jenerette, T. McPhearson, D. E. Pataki, S. T. A. Pickett, R. V. Pouyat, E. J. Rosi-Marshall, and B. L. Ruddell. 2017b. Moving towards a new Urban Systems Science. Ecosystems 20:38-43. DOI:10.1007/s10021-016-0053-4  

8.    Ni, X., and P. M. Groffman. 2018. Declines in methane uptake in forest soils. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences   https://www.pnas.org/content/115/34/8587

9.    Schmidt, D. J., R. Pouyat, K. Szlavecz, H. Setälä, D. J. Kotze, I. Yesilonis, S. Cilliers, E. Hornung, M. Dombos, and S. A. Yarwood. 2017. Urbanization erodes ectomycorrhizal fungal diversity and may cause microbial communities to converge. Nature Ecology & Evolution 1:0123. DOI: 10.1038/s41559-017-0123

10.  Rosi-Marshall, E., and T. Royer. 2012. Pharmaceutical compounds and ecosystem function: An emerging research challenge for aquatic ecologists. Ecosystems 15:867-880. DOI:10.1007/s1--21-021-9553-z

Administrative Details: Lead Principal Investigator: Dr. Emma J. Rosi Institution: Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies Established 1998, LTER 1637661 (3.75 funding cycles) Sponsoring NSF Directorate / Division / NSF Program(s): BIO/DEB/Ecosystems

Emma J. Rosi, Director

Peter M. Groffman, Deputy Director

Why is Urban Sustainability so Hard? The Trap of the Sanitary City

A few months ago, I was having a lively discussion with some serious and dedicated undergraduates at a university I was visiting.  The fact that they were disappointed with their training in sustainability came up -- They felt they weren't being told how to practice sustainability.  This provided an opportunity for interesting engaged discussion, and helped me clarify some of my own thoughts.  Here's what came up for me.  I'll frame these thoughts in the context of urban ecology, since that's where I usually think about sustainability.  In fact it is hard to think about sustainability in any kind of ecosystem without including urban connections.

There are two basic reasons for the difficulty.  Sustainability is technically complex, and sustainability, unlike traditional strategies of urban management, doesn't yet have a recipe.  Here I'm following a distinction between complicated and complex (Allen and Starr 1982).

Sustainability is Technically Complex

Sustainability was first introduced in the 1970s.  But its most famous articulation is that of the Bruntland Commission in 1987.   This canonical definition emphasizes not only the need to consider the effect of current decisions on future generations and on people and places distant from the seat of decision making, but it also emphasizes that three things must be considered jointly: environmental integrity, economic vitality, and social equity.

Right off the bat, it is clear that sustainability is a multifaceted pursuit.  So it is likely to be complex because there are many components of each facet, and the facets will most likely interact.  If one acknowledges that sustainability tacitly assumes the subject to be a "human ecosystem," the reason for the resulting complexity of sustainability becomes clear.  Human ecosystems contain, at the minimum, biological components, physical environmental components, constructed components, technology, social structures, political processes, and economic resources.  And this long list is only indicative.  The interactions between and among components guarantee that efforts to assess and guide sustainability must involve all the components.  Non-linearities, multiple and scale-crossing feedbacks, and temporal lags would all lend considerable complexity to sustainability.

The Classic Sanitary Approach to Cities Is, in Contrast, Complicated

Contrast the complexity of sustainability to the way that cities have mostly been considered.  Most cities in areas that have experienced a history of industrialization can now be called "sanitary cities" (Melosi 2000).  The rise of the industrial city, especially when powered by coal, was a polluted affair.  Acidic and particle-laden smoke from factories and home fires made the air a "foul and pestilent congregation of vapours," to quote Shakespeare (Hamlet Act II, Scene 2).  The concentration of so many people in new settlements hurriedly built to house the new industrial workers who flocked from the countryside, led to fecal pollution of streams and even in many cases well water.  The industrial cities on Europe and North America, although desirable to waves of new migrants due to economic opportunity and intellectual and other freedoms, were clearly bad for people's health.  Bouts of mortality from waterborne diseases characterized these cities, and as late as the 1950s, significant mortality resulted from the "killer smogs" in some cities.

From the waste and disease of these industrial behemoths a new model of the city emerged.  Called by Martin Melosi (2000) "the sanitary city," this city model involved new ways of laying out cities and the development of infrastructure to provide clean water and convey sewage away from the city, for example.  In addition, the sanitary city model required new forms of governance, new modes of financing infrastructure, and new zoning regulations aimed at reducing hazards and promoting health.  In some cities, these structures began to emerge in the mid to late 1800s, while in other cities of the Global North, the physical and institutional structures did not emerge until the early 20th century.  In the United States, the efforts to clean up both urban and non-urban environments continued through the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972, and the Clean Air Act in 1970.

Sanitary cities are governed through various departments charged with generating and maintaining the key infrastructure, or managing the solid and water-borne waste flows so that people were usually separated from the most noxious threats.  "Late" Sanitary Era development changed the strategy from shunting wastes "away" from the city, or at least away from districts inhabited by the wealthy and empowered, to reducing and treating wastes.  The ethical attention to populations and locations downstream and downwind was an important development in the sanitary city strategy, one that recognized the integration of urban areas with larger regional, and in the case of air pollution, continental-scale areas.

Constraints of the Sanitary City

The sanitary city strategy can be considered a success.  Sanitary cities are not the killers that the smoke shrouded, sewage drenched killers that Charles Dickens novelized.  But when compared with the more comprehensive strategy of sustainability, the sanitary city has some real shortcomings.  Some of these are in fact problematic legacies that must be overcome.  In the language of resilience theory, a sanitary city can harbor "rigidity traps" that hamper the transition to sustainability.  Here are some examples:

• Sanitary cities are governed from the top down, with resources provided by public funds.  Shortfalls in city funding can impair the functioning and maintenance of the massive physical infrastructure required for sanitation.  The sustainable city may benefit from alternative funding structures.

• Sanitary cities are managed by licensed specialists who are responsible to specific, issue oriented departments.  For example, drinking water, sewage, planning, justice, finance, housing, may each be managed by different departments or bureaus.  The sustainable city requires that all structures and functions in an urban place be thought of and managed as a system, not a series of loosely connected administrative units.

• The sanitary city may be seen as a tool to preserve the health and productivity of an industrial work force.  The sustainable city must adopt a stance of environmental and social equity, rather than be driven by the economic interests of a wealthy elite.

Other contrasts can be drawn between the sanitary city and the sustainable city models (Grove 2010; Pickett et al 2013).  However, this short list points out that there are key differences between the two.

New Recipes for Sustainable Urban Transformation

To return to the question of why it is hard to learn the sustainable city, much less actually promote sustainable trajectories in real cities, another point must be made.  Urbanists, politicians, planners, designers, management professions, and even residents of cities, have had something on the order of 150 years to visualize, develop, and improve the sanitary city model.  Authors such as Graham and Marvin (2001) and Gandy (2003) have explained in depth the complicated nature of the sanitary city, and the long time it took to develop and deploy the physical, political, and social structures needed to build and operate it.  Yet, for many of us "urban/suburban fish" in the Global North, the sanitary city is the "water we swim in."  It hardly elicits a second thought.  We don't have to be taught what it means to run it.  We may be troubled by environmental injustices within it, or its growing susceptibility to climate change, or the buffeting by shifting global economic investment.  But we fundamentally understand what kind of thing and experience a sanitary city is.

Not so the sustainable city.  Those who are committed to the future of cities are in the process of creating a new model -- a new recipe -- for cities.   The recipe for sustainability must facilitate the internal environmental integrity, the regional effects, the social livabilities and equitability, and of course the hoped for economic productivity of urban places.  And this recipe hasn't had long to mature.  The fact that sustainability requires input from a diversity of residents, citizens, and officials makes the initial visioning process difficult, yet crucial.  The fact that sustainability governance in many cases has to be built on top of existing legal structures, and indeed, to compensate for the fragmented management of what should be dealt with as an integrated system, adds its own kind of complexity.  But, from an ecological perspective, perhaps the biggest hurdle facing urban sustainability is beginning to see cities as hybrid systems -- having inextricably linked biological and social-economic features.  The recipe can't just deal with ingredients as independent parts.

It is no wonder that learning and practicing sustainability is so difficult.  But the students who today are struggling mightily with what sustainability is, how to apply that thinking to the hobbled sanitary urban systems they may have inherited, and how to make trajectories toward sustainability in and outside of cities the norm, are the folks who will ultimately be able to say: "This is the new post-sanitary model of urban systems, this is how the sustainable city works, this is how you apply the model to cities that are brand new or the large number of cities in the Global South and East that haven't even had an industrial and sanitary phase, and this is how you structure governance networks to operate it."  One day, the sooner the better, the Sustainable City models will be off the shelf recipes with high altitude and tropical variants, and suggestions for culturally different flavors.

Bon appetit!

Steward T.A. Pickett

Background Publications.

Allen, T.F.H. and T.B. Starr. 1982. Hierarchy: Perspectives for Ecological Complexity. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Cadenasso, M. L., S. T. A. Pickett, and J. M. Grove. 2006. Dimensions of ecosystem complexity: Heterogeneity, connectivity, and history. Ecological Complexity 3:1–12.

Childers, D. L., M. L. Cadenasso, J. M. Grove, V. Marshall, B. McGrath, and 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 7:3774–3791.

Gandy, M. 2003. Concrete and clay: reworking nature in New York City. MIT Press, Cambridge.

Graham, S., and S. Marvin. 2001. Splintering urbanism: networked infrastructures, technological mobilities and the urban condition. Routledge, New York.

Grove, J.M. 2010. Cities: Managing Densely Settled Social–Ecological Systems. Pp 281-294 In F. Stuart Chapin, III, Gary P. Kofinas and Carl Folke (eds.) Principles of Ecosystem Stewardship Resilience-Based Natural Resource Management in a Changing World. Springer, New York.

 

Melosi, M. V. 2000. The Sanitary City: Environmental Services in Urban America from Colonial Times to the Present. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh.

Pickett, S. T. A., C. G. Boone, B. P. McGrath, M. L. Cadenasso, D. L. Childers, L. A. Ogden, M. McHale, and J. M. Grove. 2013. Ecological science and transformation to the sustainable city. Cities 32, Supplement 1:S10–S20.

A Moving Field Guide

Seeing the World

Science starts with noticing the world – what plants and animals do, the changes in vegetation over time – or in wondering what’s going on beneath the surfaces we see.  Careful observation continues as we devise instruments or methods to extend our initial view, guided by models and concepts.  Experiments are another window for observing new conditions, perhaps ones that don’t usually exist in the real world.

Whatever makes people notice the world and its denizens more closely, or even at all, advances science and the appreciation of scientific knowledge.  I was fortunate to recently see how dance opened the eyes of about a dozen 5^th and 6^th graders from east Baltimore.  Members of the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in cooperation with Dr. Mark Twery of the Forest Service and Dr. Marla McIntosh of the University of Maryland led the young people through several activities that sensitized them to their immediate environment, familiarized them with the compass directions, and provided opportunities to observe aquatic and terrestrial situations in Patterson Park.

Moving To Notice/Noticing To Move

Those of us who are trained in science are used to paying close attention to the world, guided by years of experience under the tutelage of mentors and collaboration with colleagues.  After a while it becomes a habit, and paying close attention can be almost automatic.  But how do you get a 5^th grader to notice the environment and organisms?

Members of The Dance Exchange company had a plan.  Get the kids to relax into movement.  Get them to do some simple orienteering, and ask them to observe something special and personal along the way, pay attention to each kid.  Some of the company members had backgrounds in environmental education, and along with the visiting experts, engaged in discussions that refined or generated new understanding about life, energy, and leaves of giant oak trees, seed dispersal in little leaf linden, tasty fruit of Juneberry trees, and migration of birds.  The students also thought about the connections, some plausible and some quite fanciful, that might have led to the demise of a giant mulberry tree.  

The dancers and the kids invented movements to represent the insights they learned along the way.  The swirling motion of dispersing winged seeds, the shivering collapse of a dead tree, the upward swoop of water rising in the trunks of  trees, an imagined encounter with a bushy tailed skunk that might depend on one of the trees, and the left handed, right handed, and ambidextrous shapes of mulberry leaves were some of the observations and ideas that made it into the dances.  It was a special treat to see the creative “ah ha moments” as the professional dancers translated ecological facts and observations into motions – sometimes small, and sometimes grand in scope.  These moves were combined into dances that also embodied personal reactions to the local environment, memories of trips, and events in the kids’ lives.

Dancing To Remember

Over the course of a couple hours in the park, a goodly amount of ecological knowledge was imparted or reinforced.  The two groups of students and their accompanying Dance Exchange members collaborated to generate some impressive and engaging sequences of moves.  These dance sequences became the “Moving Field Guide,” a lively phrase created by Cassie Meador of the Dance Exchange.  The Moving Field Guide added a new creative dimension to the usual records of scientists: making notes, recording measurements of dimensions and processes in the material world, and interpreting those observations in the light of existing concepts and knowledge.  Thinking about dance movement as a way to facilitate the entry of novice observers into the complexities of ecological structures and processes was new to me.  It proved to be a powerful tool, and I suspect one that will help cement new ecological knowledge for the students who helped make the Moving Field Guide, Patterson Park, June 2, 2011.

Keeping up in BES

This year, I will focus here on activities related to the preparation of our renewal proposal for the Baltimore Ecosystem Study. We anticipate the proposal will be due in early 2010.

But there are many important and interesting things going on in BES besides our planning for the renewal.

One of them is the launch of our Education Newsletter. You can find that at http://beslter.org/frame5-page_8.html Alternatively, it appears under the "Education" menu on the main page of the BES web site.

I also encourage people to check the "What's New at BES?" link right in the middle of the main BES web page. You'll see a date beneath the link letting you know when it was last updated.

If you have any materials that you would like to share with the larger BES community through our website, please send them to Holly Beyar, Project Facilitator at beyarh@caryinstitute.org