Print PageA central recent advance in urban ecology has been the recognition that human actions strongly influence ecological patterns and that these human actions are themselves conditioned by values, lifestyle, experiences, social group, and institutional forces. We present ongoing research through the NSF/USDA ULTRA-Ex program, designed to extend these theoretical insights by addressing a diverse set of socioeconomic drivers that are changing the forest cover and composition of the Boston Metropolitan Area. We focus on two socio-ecological processes: urban growth and urban greening. We propose a view of urban greening as a spatially distributed and coupled form of land use-land cover change (LULCC), with diverse drivers and multiple potential outcomes. Changes in ecosystem structure, including the delivery of ecosystem services, are recognized as the aggregate outcomes of many local acts. Each greening intervention can be treated as an opportunistic experiment, with testable predictions regarding its consequences. From this perspective, urban greening can be placed in the context of broader scale processes of urban-associated LULCC, such as suburbanization and urban infill. Hitherto, greening has been viewed as a set of practices rather than as an integral component of a study system. The Boston Metropolitan Area is experiencing both inexorable urban growth (suburbanization) and municipally supported efforts toward urban greening, making it an ideal laboratory for understanding the relationships between these two complex processes. We examine urban greening in Boston proper and suburbanization and land conservation in the broader metropolitan region, addressing socioeconomic drivers and quantifying outcomes in terms of forest cover, open space, biodiversity, and human behavior and perceptions.
Results/Conclusions
Our analyses to date indicate that urban greening proceeds from as complex a set of socioeconomic drivers as other forms of LULCC. In addition, the small scale changes wrought by urban greening activities have some detectable ecological signatures. For example, densities of some native bird species were higher at sites that had been altered through urban greening projects relative to nearby randomly selected, non-greened locations. Through a quantitative analysis of LULCC more broadly in the metropolitan region and qualitative analysis of town-level open space plans, we found that non-profit land conservation trusts play a significant role in acquiring and maintaining land for conservation purposes, often aided by municipal investment in conservation staff. We explore the implications of our work for municipal greening and land conservation programs as well as for a more general understanding of socio-ecological systems.
