BES Annual Report 2017: Part 1 - What Have We Been Up To?

Major Goals of BES

The Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES) conducts research on metropolitan Baltimore as an ecological system. Focus on urban systems is important for several reasons. First, they are a novel ecosystem type which has been neglected during most of the history of ecology in the United States. As such, they contain 1) a variety of constructed and highly managed components and substrates; 2) altered climates, environmental resources, stresses, and signals, 3) unprecedented mixtures of species including exotic invasives and; 4) human intention and perception, individual and institutional decision making, and built and social legacies.

Second, the novel combinations of factors, and their changing relationships over time, can expose new mechanisms controlling ecosystem function. From a pure science perspective, the novel conditions allow ecologists to evaluate the understanding of ecosystem structure and function generated from study of non-urban systems. There is still much to discover at the interface of the ecological and the urban.

Finally, urban systems are an increasingly important ecosystem type at continental and global scales. In the United States some 84% of the population resides in officially designated urban areas, and globally more than 50% reside in such places. These percentages are increasing, and the area affected by urban cover, economy, social values, and byproducts is increasing disproportionately (Buijs et al. 2010, Merrifield 2014). 

Thus, BES contributes to 1) the fundamental understanding of a novel ecosystem type, 2) exposing how different mechanisms control the structure and function of the ecosystem through experiments, opportunistic environmental disturbances, and social interventions over time, and 3) generating knowledge that is increasingly relevant as urbanization continues to spread and intensity over time. 

Urban LTER Core Areas

BES generates data using long-term comparative and experimental approaches, and pursues synthesis via conceptual frameworks, quantitative simulation, and statistical prediction. BES research addresses the five original core areas of the Long-Term Ecological Research Network as articulated in 1980 (http://www.lternet.edu/research/core-areas), in addition to the three specific kinds of human effects and human-environment interactions called for in by the 1997 urban LTER request for proposals:

1. Primary Production 
2. Population Studies 
3. Movement of Organic Matter 
4. Movement of Inorganic Matter
5. Disturbance Patterns 
6. Human impact on land use and land-cover change;
7. Land use and land-cover effects on ecosystem dynamics;
8. Integrated approaches to human-environment interactions.

The specifically urban core areas, appearing in items six through eight above, are extracted from the 1997 RFP, quoted here:

"In addition to the traditional LTER core areas, an Urban LTER will:

·        examine the human impact on land use and land-cover change in urban systems and relate these effects to ecosystem dynamics,

·        monitor the effects of human-environmental interactions in urban systems, develop appropriate tools (such as GIS) for data collection and analysis of socio-economic and ecosystem data, and develop integrated approaches to linking human and natural systems in an urban ecosystem environment, and

·        integrate research with local K-12 educational systems."

The first two of the additional core areas actually identify several, more specific research mandates. We have broken the first new item into two, because it suggests complementary causal models involving land cover: change versus effect. The requirement for examining human-environment interaction also embodies specific concerns with new data sources and analytic tools, and a focus on integrating the human and natural components of urban ecosystems. 

To satisfy these requirements, the urban LTERs necessarily have additional and compound core research areas, beyond the five traditional ones that the LTER program has required since 1980. The final item requires a specific channel for engaging with the local community and institutions. 

The mandate of the urban LTERs, encompassing eight core research areas, demands a social-ecological approach rather than a strictly ecological approach (Grove and Burch 1997, Collins et al. 2000, Redman et al. 2004). A biological ecosystem exists in a specified area or volume of the Earth, and consists of a biotic component, a physical component, and the interactions between those two components. The concept also recognizes that some fluxes can move across the ecosystem boundary. 

To apply the ecosystem concept to urban systems, that is those that occupy extensive combinations of cities, suburbs, and exurbs, a component consisting of human and social processes and structures must be added (Naveh 2000, Pickett and Grove 2009). Perhaps the most cogent way to accomplish this addition is to focus on the decisions that people and institutions make about where to locate and build, and how to manage the constructed and biological features of an urban ecosystem or landscape. 

Three Major Research Foci

The larger goals, the conceptual frameworks they require, and the empirical complexity of urban ecosystems have prompted BES research to adopt three major, linked foci: 

1) the flux of materials and energy; 

2) the organization of biotic communities; and 

3) the locational and management decisions by people and institutions. 

The eight core areas for urban LTERs are distributed across these three foci. The foci are one tool by which data gathering is integrated in habitat-based research or shared, cross disciplinary sampling regimes. In addition, integration is accomplished by eco-hydrological modeling, agent based social and economic modeling, and Bayesian network analysis. 

In the next post, we will present some of the key activities undertaken over the past year that serve the goals of the project. 

What's An Urban Long-Term Ecological Research Project To Do?

When in 1997 the National Science Foundation (NSF) requested proposals for up to two urban Long-Term Ecological sites to join the network of wild and production ecosystems that had been studied up to that point, it had both long-standing and new goals in mind.  These goals emerged from two main conditions.

Landscape ecologist M.L. Cadenasso, architect Phanat Xanamane, and landscape architect Victoria Marshall (L-R) work on the "periodic table" of urban land covers for Baltimore using the HERCULES methodology.

First, there was the need to understand ecological systems over the long term.  Since 1980, Long-Term Ecological Research “sites,” as they are still most often called, had been funded to conduct research in specific places over the long term.  This was a reaction to the fact that most scientific ecological studies funded before then had been of short duration, generally 1 to 3 years.  That situation limited ecological understanding because many ecological processes take many years or even decades to play out.  Succession, natural disturbance, the accumulation or loss of nutrients, the change in soil and climate, or the effects of colonization of a new species, for example, are processes that require long times to occur, and thus, similarly long times to evaluate.  Of course, simulation modeling can take existing data and, making careful assumptions about dynamics, make reasonable projections through time.  But at some point the validity of such projections is most securely evaluated against real data.  In 1997, the network of 18 sites included such extremes as moist deciduous forest, and a northern hardwoods mountain transect-- both in the eastern US -- temperate coniferous forest in the Pacific Northwest, coastal sites, a high alpine site, a forest and a tundra site in Alaska, a tropical forest, desert grassland, shrub desert, short grass prairie, an agricultural site, northern and southern lakes, and so on.  (See www.lter.edu for the complete roster and history of sites.)  The urban sites would add a new kind of ecosystem in which long-term changes were undoubtedly important, to the existing roster of LTER sites.

The second goal was to add sites that explicitly examined the role of people as components of the ecosystems to be studied.  Except for the agricultural site in Michigan, usually people were not thought to be of great significance to the structure and functioning of LTER sites.  But beginning in the early 1980s, when more and more ecologists began to look seriously at the history and distant connections of their sites, the conclusion became clear, that people – both present and absent – could no longer be ignored in understanding the ecology of North America.  So NSF acted on this second goal in choosing a focus on systems where people and their actions could never be ignored – urban ecosystems.

The final goal, according to the 1997 Request for Proposals, was “to enhance the interdisciplinary breadth of the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network.”  Obviously, to understand urban areas as ecosystems, the skills, talents, theories, and methodologies of experts in various social sciences would have to be integrated with the familiar work of biological ecologists and the physical scientists they were used to working with.  Urban ecological research would necessarily be interdisciplinary.  Not only the technical expertise of social and economic scientists would be required, but also their experience in dealing with social structures and human institutions would be needed for working in urban systems.  It turned out in Baltimore that we also recognized the need to borrow their “social capital” and trust built up over decades of working with communities, organizations, and governments in the Baltimore region.

Putting all this together resulted in seven explicit goals that an urban LTER would have to satisfy.  Five were required of all LTER sites, and had been in place since 1980:

·        Primary Production: pattern and control of primary production,

·        Population Studies: spatial and temporal distribution of populations selected to represent trophic structure,

·        Movement of Organic Matter: pattern and control of organic matter accumulation in surface layers and sediments,

·        Movement of Inorganic Matter: patterns of inorganic inputs and movements of nutrients through soils, groundwater, and surface waters, and

·        Disturbance: patterns and frequency of disturbance to the research site.

But in addition, urban LTERs would have to deal with:

·        Land Use and Land Cover Change: examine the human impact on land use and land-cover change in urban systems and relate these effects to ecosystem dynamics,

·        Human-Environment Interactions: monitor the effects of human-environmental interactions in urban systems, develop appropriate tools (such as GIS) for data collection and analysis of socio-economic and ecosystem data, and develop integrated approaches to linking human and natural systems in an urban ecosystem environment, and

·        School Systems: integrate research with local K-12 educational systems.

The seven core urban LTER action areas and the BES long-term data or programs that contribute to each one.  The five core research areas identified with the origin of the LTER Network in 1980 are shown in brown, and the additional core activities defined in the 1997 NSF call for urban LTER proposals are shown in blue-grey.

So it turns out that the Urban LTERs, our Baltimore Ecosystem Study and the Central Arizona-Phoenix LTER have seven core areas of accomplishment. These seven core requirements can be considered the charter of the Urban LTERs.  Integration of social and biophysical approaches to understand the feedbacks in urban ecosystems as complex, spatially heterogeneous mosaics, is thus a multidimensional pursuit in satisfying the founding charter.  

A Presentation on BES III: Research, Education, and Engagement from the Sanitary to the Sustainable City

By now, friends and members of BES are familiar with the new research strategy we have developed to guide our third grant cycle.  A new six year grant is an opportunity to keep up important long-term measurements and experiments, but is also a chance to make important changes.

The fact that the Baltimore metropolitan area has several jurisdictions that have generated substantial, broadly based sustainability plans suggested that one change BES should make was to study how those sustainability efforts in fact changed the social-ecological dynamics of the city, suburbs, and countryside as a linked system.  Earlier posts in the Director's Corner laid out the planning process that led to this decision.  Other posts described the proposal and the strategy it embodied.

Now I have posted a narrated slide presentation on Nature Precedings that gives an overview of BES Phase III.  To hear the narration, use the PowerPoint version.  The PDF version will just have the slides.  The presentation does violate the YouTube rule:  It is long, about 20 minutes.  But for those who like slides, and who enjoy being walked through them, have a look.

Here's the link:

http://precedings.nature.com/documents/6499/version/1

Here's the via Digital Object Identifier (DOI):
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/npre.2011.6499.1

Here's how to cite the narrated presentation:

Pickett, Steward. Introduction to the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, Long-Term Ecological Research Project, Phase III. Available from Nature Precedings (2011)

BES Photo Album Now Publically Available

Need a photograph of BES research activities or sites for your teaching or non-commercial publication? Have a great photo of sites, people, research activities, or education in action? Access the BES Picasa album at http://picasaweb.google.com/117245078152518298258/BES# to download photos.

If you use a photo, please credit Baltimore Ecosystem Study Long-Term Ecological Research project, and the National Science Foundation. You may use the photos to support academic, educational activities. The rights granted are non-exclusive and pertain to electronic and print formats.

If you have a photo to upload, please recognize that it may be used in the ways indicated above. Please provide a descriptive caption. We will assume that persons depicted give their permission to have their images used for educational and research purposes. Write to BES Information Manager, Jonathan Walsh through walshj at caryinstitute.org to obtain credentials to upload photos to this album.

Enjoy and contribute!