Lifestyle choices: Land management practices and the ecology of prestige - Results from the Baltimore LTER project

To understand social and ecological patterns and processes in urban ecosystems, researchers and managers have attempted to understand how ecological structure and productivity varies among different social groups. For the past 30 years, researchers have relied primarily on theories and measures of population and social stratification. Recently, researchers from the Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES) have proposed an ecology of prestige: the phenomenon in which household patterns of consumption and expenditure on environmentally relevant goods and services are motivated by group identity and perceptions of social status associated with different lifestyles. Using high resolution social and ecological spatial and temporal data such as property parcels and landcover (>1m), we have tested the relationships among composite measures of population, social stratification, and lifestyle with vegetation extent, structure, and productivity on public and private lands at the neighborhood scale. In this presentation, we summarize our findings from these studies of property regimes and social agency and its implications for theory, methods, and applications. Of particular interest in a long term context is cause and effect, and the possibility that some social groups are attracted to and conserve existing, desired landscapes at a neighborhood scale, while others move to and rehabilitate their landscapes.