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.

Outcomes of an Urban Sustainability Research Network

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

Ecosystem as Place; Ecosystem as Network

The most frequently cited definition of the ecosystem concept owes its origin to Sir Arthur G. Tansley in 1935 (Pickett and Grove 2009).  It has proven to be a very flexible concept, and can be applied to any scale that includes aggregations of physical environment and organisms, plus the interactions among all physical and biological components.  The interactions are just as important as the material, energy, and organisms that exist within ecosystems.  Nevertheless, ecosystems are usually specified as locations or places, that is volumes of some part of the Earth, whether watery, dry land, or wetland (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Experimental watersheds at the Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study in New Hampshire as ecosystems.  Using the ecosystems as place perspective, the watersheds, with boundaries set by the flow of surface water into the receiving stream, are recognizable ecosystems for the purposes of research and modeling. A photograph of a landscape may represent one or many ecosystems, but it is necessary for the researchers or managers to specify the boundary of each system that the photo might show.

Ecosystem as Interaction

Yet, there is a view of ecosystems that places the interactions themselves as the focus.  This usage is most often heard in the vernacular or in discussions about corporate products and the services they deliver.  Hence, one hears about such things as the "Apple ecosystem," or the "Google ecosystem," or the "health care ecosystem."  Clearly such usages place the connections and flows of information, products, or outcomes at the center of concern.  A bounded and contiguous place is not the point in this use of ecosystem as a network.

Networks are a primary concern of many sciences.  Information sciences, neurosciences, industrial ecology, and studies of governance (Figure 2) often emphasize connections and flows of information, power, influence, materials, and energy.  Traffic engineers and planners envision their topic in terms of networks, although those networks can be seen to serve both close and distant territories.  The network rather than the territory or place is the point.

Figure 2. A network approach to a system.  This is a governance network, showing the connections between government agencies, non-governmental organizations, and community associations concerned with environmental stewardship. The connections represent the sharing of finances, resources, staff, or information. (From Romolini and Grove, 2013.)

So it may seem that the network perspective and the place-delimited view of ecosystem are contradictory and divergent approaches to science.  But this is not the case.  In fact, ecology is a science of interaction.  A traditional definition of ecology states that it is the study of the interaction between organisms and their environments.  However, this definition can be expanded to acknowledge the variety of units or entities other than just organisms that are involved in those interactions.  For example, in the 1950s ecology expanded to consider ecosystems as entities in which biogeochemical processes were the concern.  In the 1980s in the United States, landscape ecology was imported and adapted to emphasize the interactions that involved spatially heterogeneous mosaics at various scales.  Even populations and communities came to be seen as comprising subsets that interacted across space, as in metapopulation or metacommunity theory.  The explicitly interaction-focused definitions of ecology (Box 1) work equally well with the place-based or the network-based approachs to systems.  

Box 1: The Cary Institute Definition of Ecology.  The scientific study of the processes influencing the distribution and abundance of organisms, the interactions among organisms, and the interactions between organisms and the transformation and flux of energy and matter.

A network is also a system, but specifically a system of interaction pathways, mechanisms, or flows.  In other words, a network can be considered to be an infrastructure or a process that takes place over that infrastructure.  Networks as infrastructure may involve materially connected continuous pathways, like roads or wires.  But infrastructural networks can also involve fields, like broadcast via electromagnetic radiation (McGrath and Shane 2012).  Certainly, the underlying fields are continuous, but the function of networks that rely on electromagnetic media seem more discontinuous, since the information can travel great distances with no tangible expression of the network until the message is delivered and decoded.

Joining Networks and Places 

Some theories in urban ecology attempt to deal simultaneously with the place-based and network-based conceptions of systems.  For example, the continuum of urbanity recognizes that local to global connections are key to understanding urban systems now (Seto et al. 2012, Boone et al. 2014).  The fine scale connections can be via road, rail, pipes, fiber, or copper.  Even at regional scales, these physical networks remain important.  Shipping lanes and airline routes are a different kind of infrastructure, but they support regional to global connections in which urban areas partake.  Satellite communications, radio, and wireless act at various scales and can be seen as virtual networks.  The regional and global networks have become a part of daily urban system functioning.   

These networks connect places, and those places embody lifestyles, livelihoods, and environmental conditions that are key drivers of urban ecosystem structure, function, and change.  The continuum of urbanity expresses the seminal role of connections when it acknowledges that rural, urban, and wild places -- ecosystems in the sense of Tansley -- contain and are parts of extensive continuous and virtual networks.  So ecosystems are both place and network.

Literature Cited

Boone, C. G., C. L. Redman, H. Blanco, D. Haase, J. Koch, S. Lwasa, H. Nagendra, S. Pauleit, S. T. A. Pickett, K. C. Seto, and M. Yokohari. 2014. Reconceptualizing land for sustainable urbanity. Pages 313–330in K. C. Seto and A. Reenberg, editors.Rethinking urban land use in a global era. MIT Press, Cambridge.

McGrath, B., and G. Shane. 2012. Introduction: metropolis, megalopolis, and metacity. Page in C. G. Crysler, S. Cairns, and H. Heynen, editors. The SAGE handbook of architectural theory. SAGE, Washington, DC.

Pickett, S. T. A., and J. M. Grove. 2009. Urban ecosystems: what would Tansley do? Urban Ecosystems 12:1–8.

Michele Romolini, J. Morgan Grove. 2013. Assessing and comparing relationships between urban environmental stewardship networks and land cover in Baltimore and Seattle. Landscape and Urban Planning 120:190–207.

Seto, K. C., A. Reenberg, C. G. Boone, M. Fragkias, D. Haase, T. Langanke, P. Marcotullio, D. K. Munroe, B. Olah, and D. Simon. 2012. Urban land teleconnections and sustainability. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 109:7687–7692.

Steward Pickett