Phenology of green infrastructure in cities: A window into ecosystem services in urban environments

Background/Question/Methods

Urban natural landscapes provide services that may address a variety of environmental and urban planning needs, including improvement of hydrological systems, disaster risk mitigation, mitigation of climate change effects, amelioration of heat islands and carbon sequestration. Green infrastructure is considered a strategy for adapting to climate change and environmental stresses, however its benefits have not been evaluated systematically as an integrated analysis of landscape morphologies and ecosystem services. We are exploring the drivers and benefits of green infrastructure investment at local and regional scales using remote sensing and spatial data in an emerging mega-region, the Colorado Front Range, which extends across two states from Pueblo, Colorado to Laramie, Wyoming. The objective of this study was to evaluate how green infrastructure functions within the built environment (represented by vegetation seasonality) under alternative development regimes. First, we characterized both the built and un-built components of landscape morphologies at sample sites (using high detail data) and across the region (using moderate resolution data). Second, we evaluated patterns of phenology (temporal variation in MODIS NDVI) and land use/land cover within the framework of these morphologies.

Results/Conclusions

Our preliminary results support green infrastructure policy as an adaptive strategy to conditions of climate change and resource scarcity. Relationships of vegetation phenology (seasonality and productivity) with socio-economic variables such as income, variables associated with density of population and housing, and surface variables such as impermeable surface are significant. Moreover, proportions of built elements appear to be important, which suggests that urban design related to features such as impervious cover and configuration of building footprints may affect ecosystem services. Also, correlations between phenology and socio-economic variables, which are partially independent of built-area, indicate that factors such as income and ethnicity may play a significant role in landscape choices, with larger ecosystem effects on regional water usage (via irrigation) and urban surface temperatures.