Urban LTER: Human Settlements as Ecosystems: Metropolitan Baltimore from 1797 - 2100

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9714835 Pickett This LTER project in metropolitan Baltimore, Maryland, will address three general questions: 1) How do the spatial structure of socio-economic, ecological, and physical factors in an urban area relate to one another, and how do they change through time? 2) What are the fluxes of energy, matter, capital, and population in urban systems, and how do they change over time? 3) How can people develop and use an understanding of the metropolis as an ecological system to improve the quality of their environment? These questions will be addressed at a range of scales, from individual patches up to the entire Primary Statistical Metropolitan Area. In so doing, this project will help resolve fundamental issues about the ecology and temporal dynamics of cities and suburbs, and quantify an end member ecosystem for comparison with less human-dominated ecosystems. The project revolves around an integrated framework to study urban areas as ecological systems, including physical, ecological, and socio-economic components. The target will be processes that control the function of urban areas as ecological systems, and their effects on other ecosystems. The framework will be tested by determining whether socio-economic, physical and ecological components of systems share common spatial structures, and whether each component responds to changes in others in space and time. The research plan includes descriptive, historical, and experimental analyses. Dominant patch types will be characterized using ecological, physical, and socio-economic variables. This approach will produce high resolution, whole watershed, and whole city estimates of ecological and socio-economic fluxes, as well as allow development of simulation models capable of depicting the interactive effects of land use, habitat and social change on ecological functions. Data from historical records and sediment pollen cores will allow testing of hypotheses about how social and ecological factors interact to affect how these function s have changed in the past and how they might change in the future. Two long-term experiments - a manipulation of exotic plant species and an ecologically-based social initiative in neighborhood restoration - will test how human and ecological components of the system interact and change. Research on system function will address surface/atmosphere energy exchange, hydrologic and nutrient flux, atmospheric deposition, and the import/export of raw and processed materials and waste products, and of capital. Two scales will be considered - the whole-city scale and the small-watershed scale - in part to foster comparison with other studies of natural and human-dominated ecosystems. The education objectives will provide useful ecological understandings and data access to the research process, and direct support to students, teachers, managers, and the general public. This project will build close linkages with existing formal and informal education programs and institutions to build programs that improve the ecological literacy of students, citizens, and decision makers.