BES Adds Four Co-Principal Investigators

To acknowledge the broad community that contributes to and manages the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, four persons have agreed to be added as official Co-Principal Investigators and to be recognized as such by the National Science Foundation:

Dr. Mary L. Cadenasso, Associate Professor of Ecology at the University of California, Davis has been added to promote synthesis and conceptual development in BES. Mary is a landscape ecologist, was one of the co-authors of the original BES proposal and led development of the HERCULES urban land classification system.

Dr. Peter M. Groffman, Senior Scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, has been added as Deputy Director, in recognition of his management of the budget. Peter is a microbial ecologist and also contributes to the management of stream sampling and analysis.

Dr. J. Morgan Grove, Research Forester with the USDA Forest Service, has been added to facilitate interaction between BES and the Northern Research Station, which is a major contributor of research and education staff and support for their work. Dr. Grove has been working as a social ecologist in Baltimore since 1989.

Dr. Claire Welty, Director of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Center for Urban Environmental Research and Education, has been added to help formalize relationships with our host institution in Baltimore. UMBC provides lab and office space, meeting space, and intellectual partnership. Claire is a hydrologist with interest in ground water dynamics.

These new Co-PIs join the Lead Principal Investigator and Project Director, Steward T.A. Pickett of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, in being listed on the cover page of the BES III grant from NSF.

The new Co-PIs are ongoing members of the Project Management Committee (PMC) which meets monthly throughout the calendar year. The Project Management Committee administers BES, with yearly input from the Steering Committee, a meeting open to all members of the BES community. The PMC consists of representatives from several institutions that are central to the management of the project, including the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies as the main grantee organization, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County as the local host institution, the USDA Forest Service as a provider of significant numbers of research staff and associated material support, and the Parks & People Foundation which facilitates community and decision maker engagement. Other members of the committee bring specific expertise or perspectives to project management, including budgetary management, conceptual and empirical synthesis, social sciences, environmental economics, aquatic sciences, the graduate student community, education research, education programming, information management, and administration. There is a seat on the committee that is filled by a new member from BES each year. This rotating position is intended to increase the breadth of participation in the committee, familiarize a larger number of BES participants with project management, and to inject new perspectives into the deliberations of the committee.

Full membership in the PMC through November 2011 is as follows:

Dr. Alan Berkowitz, Head of Education, Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, Millbrook NY

Ms Holly Beyar, BES Project Facilitator, Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies

Dr. M.L. Cadneasso, University of California, Davis

Ms Bess Caplan, Ecology Education Program Leader, Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies (office at Parks & People Foundation, Baltimore)

Ms Jacqueline Carrera, President and CEO, Parks & People Foundation, Baltimore

Dr. Peter M. Groffman, Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies

Dr. J. Morgan Grove, PMC Committee Chair, USDA Forest Service

Mr. Guy Hager, Senior Director of Great Parks, Clean Streams & Green Communities

Dr. Elena Irwin, Rotating Member 2010-2011, Ohio State University

Ms Tamara Newcomer, Graduate Student Representative, University of Maryland, College Park

Dr. Steward T.A. Pickett, BES Lead Principal Investigator and Project Director, Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies,

Mr. Jonathan M. Walsh, Information Manager, Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies

Dr. Mary Washington, Associate Director of Great Parks, Clean Streams & Green Communities, Parks & People Foundation

Dr. Claire Welty, Director, Center for Urban Environmental Research and Education, UMBC

Over the years, the following persons have served on the PMC either as rotating or longer-term members: Dr. William R. Burch, Yale University; Dr. Larry E. Band, University of North Carolina; Dr. Robert Costanza, University of Vermont; Dr. Christopher M. Swan, UMBC; Dr. Andrew Miller, UMBC; Dr. Richard V. Pouyat, USDA Forest Service; Mr. Kenneth Belt, USDA Forest Service; Dr. Geoffrey Buckley, Ohio University; Kirsten Schwarz, then of Rutgers University.

Minutes of the PMC meetings are posted for BES members on the internal pages of the BES website.

Press-Pulse Dynamics: A Hypothetical Feedback Model for Long-Term Social-Ecological Research

An important conceptual resource for BES III has recently appeared online. This publication presents the feedback cycle between social and ecological structures and functions as mediated by ecosystem services and by press and pulse events.

This conceptual framework highlights that the dynamics of press and pulse events is a key link in the integration of social and bioecological processes and structures. A version of the feedback cycle adopted for BES III, and identified by its older label of the Integrated Science for Society and Environment (ISSE) appears as Figure 2 in the BES proposal and in an earlier post on the Web Log. This framework is perhaps really best described as a model template, which can guide construction of more specific, testable models and hypotheses. This paper deserves serious study by researchers and scholars affiliated with BES.

The publication appears in the Ecological Society of America's journal, Frontiers in Ecology and Environment. Members of the Society and persons at subscribing institutions can find the paper through this Digital Object Identifier: doi:10.1890/100068

The full citation of the online publication is as follows:
Scott L Collins, Stephen R Carpenter, Scott M Swinton, Daniel E Orenstein, Daniel L Childers, Ted L Gragson, Nancy B Grimm, J Morgan Grove, Sharon L Harlan, Jason P Kaye, Alan K Knapp, Gary P Kofinas, John J Magnuson, William H McDowell, John M Melack, Laura A Ogden, G Philip Robertson, Melinda D Smith, and Ali C Whitmer. 2010. An integrated conceptual framework for long-term social–ecological research. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment (e-View)

A key phrase from the abstract of this article is, "Here, we present an iterative framework, “Press–Pulse Dynamics” (PPD), that integrates the biophysical and social sciences through an understanding of how human behaviors affect “press” and “pulse” dynamics and ecosystem processes. Such dynamics and processes, in turn, influence ecosystem services – thereby altering human behaviors and initiating feedbacks that impact the original dynamics and processes."

Photo courtesy of University of Maryland, Baltimore County. View from the roof of the Administration Building toward downtown Baltimore.

Resilience: Ecology, Evolution, and Engineering

The concept of resilience is key to BES III. This powerful concept is ideal for understanding and working with complex, human ecosystems. However, it is the object of some confusion because there are two contrasting ways to frame and theorize the concept.

Originally, engineering and physical systems were the source of the concept as applied in ecology. Under the equilibrium paradigm predominant at the time, resilience was conceived of as the ability of a system to absorb a shock or deformation and to return to its original, or equilibrium, state. A rubber band is a perfect example of such a system. The loose, floppy form can be stretched repeatedly, and still return to its general band-like shape.

Engineering or equilibrium resilience is the concept used to describe this dynamic. This sort of resilience can be called engineering resilience because it characterizes built structures and infrastructure. Key to this idea is that there is an acceptable, desired, or equilibrium state of the system. Of course, extreme deformation or perhaps consistent strong deformation over time can lead to system failure. The band breaks when stretched too far, or after years of material degradation while encircling a thick wad of forgotten papers in a hot attic.

Equilibrium or engineering resilience may be of value when it is possible to identify a desirable state that is expected to persist over some specified time or at a particular spatial scale. But for many purposes, it is best considered a special case of the concept of resilience. A more inclusive concept suitable to systems that are not at equilibrium, or which are undergoing periodic or constant change is ecological or evolutionary resilience.

Ecological resilience does not ask whether a complex system returns to a previous or equilibrium state. Rather, it asks about the changes that a system can experience and still persist in the same dynamic form. Resilience is about the ability to receive shocks and still stay in the game. Systems that can adapt to change are said to be resilient. This then is an evolutionary kind of concept since adaptation is a central feature. This is in contrast to engineering resilience which is concerned with stability or permanence. So, ecological and evolutionary resilience are concerned with adaptive capacity and adjustment to change, not to return to a stable point. Rather than asking about the ability of a rubber band to return to its unstressed state, evolution asks about the rubber band becoming something else that is better adapted to the new conditions. It is of course silly to think about a simple, physical-chemical system such as a rubber band changing in such a radical way, but evolution, adaptation, learning, and adjustment are familiar capacities of biological and social systems. In other words, they are complex systems that can adapt. Resilience in the more evolutionary sense is the idea that points toward the question of how -- and how well -- a particular system can adapt to changing conditions or sudden shocks that come at unexpected times.

Changing concepts of resilience are relevant to the BES III main theme of Sanitary to Sustainable City. The sanitary city identifies a desired state, and seeks to keep structures or processes at that level. Given that societal and regulatory decisions identify legal or desirable targets for some features people must manage, a classical or engineering definition provides guidance about how to measure success. However, under changing environmental conditions, including social, economic, and environmental alterations, it may be more appropriate to ask about the capacity of the system to adjust to those changes. Recognizing that feedbacks among social, economic, and environmental factors and processes are an unavoidable part of urban ecosystems, this suggests that we learn how to go beyond the engineering resilience concept and understand and use the contemporary concept of ecological or evolutionary resilience.

Here are some references about this contrast and the nature of ecological resilience that are relevant to socio-ecological systems.

Gunderson, L. H. 2000. Ecological resilience - in theory and application. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 31:425-439.

Holling, C. S. 1996. Engineering resilience versus ecological resilience. Pages 31-44 in P. C. Schulze, editor. Engineering within ecological constraints. National Academies of Engineering, Washington, DC.

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!

Urban Ecology: Use and Abuse

In the first two decades of the 20th century, two new scholarly disciplines were being established in the United States. One was the biological science of ecology, and one was sociology. Although both had deeper European roots, and began to flourish in several American universities, there was one school that was a seedbed for both: the University of Chicago. Historian Jennifer S. Light examines the relationship of these two disciplinary schools and the decades long ramifications of that intellectual hybridization on American urban policy (Light 2009). Her book is much richer in insights about urbanism and the linkage of ecology and policy than can be represented in a brief essay, so I encourage people to peruse her work directly.

The biological ecologists at the University of Chicago had been instrumental in elucidating the patterns and processes of change in plant communities through time. Chicago’s Henry Chandler Cowles in 1899 had published a long, multi-part paper that described the succession of plant communities on the dunes at the southern end of Lake Michigan (Cowles 1899). As the land was still rising in elevation, rebounding from the weight of the thick glaciers that had melted away some 12,000 years previously, new sandy substrate was exposed at the margin of the lake. Cowles (pronounced like the stuff burned in a furnace) described the ever taller and more complex plant communities that occupied the bands of surfaces that were located farther and farther from the lake shore.

The kinds of patterns that Cowles described as one moves from the lake shore inland were generalized by Frederick E. Clements (Clements 1916). Clements generated a theory of succession, in which he proposed that plant communities experienced progressive trends of change, leading to a diverse, stable assemblage. He likened the temporal patterns of change in assemblages of plants in the field to the life cycle an organism. Communities of plants were said to go through phases of colonization, growth, and maturation (Pickett and Cadenasso 2005).

A version of Clements’ theory was enthusiastically adopted by he Chicago sociologists in their attempt to understand their rapidly changing metropolis (Light 2009). They saw the city as a series of rings surrounding downtown, in which new immigrants invaded near the commercial core, and through competition moved outward. Like the first theory of plant succession, the sociological explanation of spatial pattern was considered to be a set life cycle. However, one important difference was that the sociologists substituted a decadent, blighted community as the end point as opposed to the idealized diverse, tall, and spatially complex “climax” forest.

The sociologists were apparently unaware of problems that were emerging with the theory of succession in biology (Miles 1979). Cowles’ original assumptions had some problems – sites that had better developed plant communities on the lake shore transect in some cases turned out to be different in other ways than just age of the substrate. Furthermore, Clements’ grand theory of succession as the life cycle of an organism was ultimately found to too rigid and methodologically problematical. Succession actually involved much variety in the patterns of change, and the mixture of causes was much more contingent on history and the landscape context than the developmental biology of individual organisms. The progressive theory of succession formulated by Clements was in dispute as early as 1917, and alternative views of the causes and patterns of succession were being worked out by a number of plant ecologists, some elsewhere in Illinois (Gleason 1917).

Why were the Chicago School sociologists so enamored of the life cycle metaphor they took and modified from ecology? Chicago had doubled in population in the early years of the 20th century, and was absorbing massive numbers of migrants from the American South and from Southern and Eastern Europe. These migrants represented groups that had largely been absent from Chicago before. They saw the effects of these waves of migrants as a succession that led to blighted neighborhoods. Slums and social pathologies were identified as problems to be solved by identifying where a neighborhood was in its life cycle, and intervening to counteract any tendencies toward blight.

Several kinds of intervention were possible. One social intervention was exemplified by the work of “settlement houses,” which were intended to introduce new migrants to values held by the predominant antecedent culture of a city. Another intervention was to attempt to keep some neighborhoods from changing to accommodate new migrants. This was accomplished by discriminatory laws or discriminatory lending practices. A third was urban planning, which could in cases where blight had proceeded beyond tolerable limits, be employed to clear slums and install new housing and neighborhood layouts intended to promote desirable social interactions. Light documents the intellectual lineages, the persistence of the life cycle approach, and the pervasive effects of this perversion of ecological thinking on the form of late 20th century American cities.

What Does This Mean for BES?

One lesson for an interdisciplinary research program emerges from Light’s analysis. The ecology that was used by the Chicago School sociologists was a superficial metaphor. Communities changed through time, that change was driven by competition, and expressed itself in an inexorable life cycle. The real mechanistic complexity that was emerging from scientific research in biological ecology was not apparently known to the Chicago sociologists. The metaphor was established in sociology through reading of ecological texts, but apparently not through conversation with practicing bioecological researchers. The complexity, the controversy, and the alternative models of vegetation change did not become part of the toolkit of the social science deployed to understand rapidly changing cities. Nor were these features of understanding community and spatial dynamics available to those who shaped federal policy of urban life cycles – the policy that supported urban renewal.

Although metaphor is a powerful bridge between disciplines, and from disciplines to application, substantive dialog between researchers and practitioners who know the frontiers of their disciplines is a sounder link. Analogy and metaphor are only tools for starting the dialog. Light provides a compelling analysis that will be of value to all urban researchers and practitioners.

References Cited

Clements, F. E. 1916. Plant succession: an analysis of the development of vegetation. Carnegie Institution of Washington, Washington.

Cowles, H. C. 1899. The ecological relations of the vegetation on the sand dune of Lake Michigan. Botanical Gazette 27:95-117,167.

Gleason, H. A. 1917. The structure and development of the plant association. Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club 44:463-481.

Light, J. S. 2009. The nature of cities: ecological visions and the American urban professions 1920-1960. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.

Miles, J. 1979. Vegetation dynamics. Wiley, New York.

Pickett, S. T. A. and M. L. Cadenasso. 2005. Vegetation succession. Pages 172-198 in E. van der Maarel, editor. Vegetation Ecology. Malden, MA, Blackwell Publishing.

Photo by Brian P. McGrath.

The New BES

The original guiding questions for the Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES) are instances of the three most fundamental things that researchers can ask: How is the system I am interested in put together and how does it change through time? How does the system interact with and influence matter and energy flows? What difference does this knowledge make?

These questions have served us well over the first dozen years of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study. So why are we adopting a new guiding question for the third phase of BES, which has been recently funded by the National Science Foundation for another six years? Why change a good thing? In fact, shouldn’t a long-term study keep doing the same thing?

Stability of effort is one of the advantages and requirements of a long-term project. Certain things must be measured consistently for many years to disentangle what causes what, and how the causes change. But that stability must be balanced by an ability to respond to change. Two kinds of change are important for motivating BES III.

One of the changes we must track is the development of urban ecology itself as an interdisciplinary science. Urban ecology is becoming more integrated across research disciplines. We must take advantage of more tightly sewn seams between social-economic and biophysical sciences. This requires us to explore new models and new joint data projects. An additional change in the science is its improving connections with urban professions and policy makers. As a result, concerns with climate change and with sustainability must become more a part of our efforts. The emergence of new views of urban sustainability and resilience drive new scientific questions.

We have adopted the idea that cities – in the broadest sense – are evolving from a sanitary city model to a sustainable city model. The sanitary city was a solution to the stresses and contamination of the industrial city in which pollution, disease, and social dislocations were seen as major problems. Brilliant engineering and public health solutions were developed, and master planning segregated harmful activities from those places where citizens lived and played. This approach was refined from the middle of the 19th century through most of the 20th century. It focused on separate sectors of urban activity, in which focused solutions were sought in isolation. This history has been reviewed in a very readable book by Martin Melosi (2000), entitled The Sanitary City.

As many cities in the global north have shifted from an emphasis on industrial production to service economies, and as many cities in the global south have even leapfrogged into service and consumption models with no intervening industrial phase, new approaches to urban management are emerging worldwide. As urban dwellers, policy makers, and designers have come to recognize that healthy economies, equitable access to environmental benefits, and resilient social networks are all required for quality of life in urban areas, the sustainability worldview has been more widely and enthusiastically embraced. Sustainability concepts suggest that cities should be designed and revitalized to include more ecological processes, to reduce resource demand and waste production, and to facilitate the formation and function of positive social networks. Of course, economic vitality is a goal as well, and one that usually gets the lion’s share of attention. Yet all these components of sustainability must receive equal weight in decision making, and that need suggests that decision making be based on improved communication and goal-setting across social and institutional boundaries. Based on the sustainability model, cities should be conceived of and managed as complex socio-ecological systems, rather than sectors solving important but narrow engineering problems. Grove (2010) has outlined the emergence of the sustainable city, and provides an entry point into the literature.

A New Guiding Research Question

The main question that emerged from our years of planning for BES III is “How do biogeophysical and social adaptive processes influence and respond to policies aimed at enhancing sustainability in the Baltimore region?” This question assumes that the policies in place and evolving in Baltimore City, Baltimore County, and the State of Maryland will themselves lead to changes in structures, activities, and socio-ecological interactions in the region. Climate change is a key aspect of the discourse and planning for a more sustainable metropolitan Baltimore. Adaptive processes are the whole range of conditions, mechanisms, resources, and actions – in both the biophysical and social realms of the Baltimore ecosystem – that can drive or constrain the extent to which sustainability is achieved.

Focusing on sustainability plans, policies, and actions suggests three, more specific research areas: 1) How do adaptive processes change as the metropolis as a whole or different segments within it evolve from a sanitary city approach to a sustainable city approach? 2) What scenarios do current and alternative policies aimed at sustainability suggest? 3) How can information exchange and education improve adaptive processes?

BES III will embody the working out of these large issues. There are fundamental scientific theories that resonate with these questions. We have chosen the theory of locational choice by households and firms, the theory of spatial heterogeneity in biodiversity, and the concept of an engineered urban stream continuum as our touchstones for linking the paradigm of sustainability with research. The community of scholars, researchers, and educators in BES have taken the understanding and application of the transition from the sanitary to the sustainable city as their motivation for the next six years of work.

References

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: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.

The Journal, Nature, Highlights Cities.

The journal Nature has featured the need for research in urban areas in its October 20th issue. The editors introduce the issue in an editorial that says, in part: "Scientists are city people. More than one-tenth of the workforce in the Washington DC metropolitan area are scientists and engineers. Beijing has more than 160,000 professionals in research and development. Worldwide, resources such as universities and researchers are concentrated in urban areas. So why do so many scientists ignore the needs of our cities? It is time to encourage scientists and universities to pay more attention to urban areas, and Nature this week includes a package of articles about researchers and cities" (Editorial, "Save our Cities," Nature 467: 883-884 doi 10.1038/46788b).

For the details, follow this link from your school or local library: www.nature.com The articles appear in volume 467, issue number 7318. In addition to the editorial quoted above, the special feature includes an overview of "The Urban Equation," a geographic description with excellent maps of urban population and growth entitled "The Century of the City," an article by Cynthia Rosenzweig et al. on "Cities Lead the Way in Climate-Change Action," and a synthesis of urbanization by Bettencourt and West entitled "A Unified Theory of Urban Living."

Members of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study and those interested in urban ecology should find this collection of articles of value.