ULTRA-Ex: Connecting the Social and Ecological Sciences with Planners, Managers, and the Public

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Cities that function well ecologically are critical to meeting pressing needs like mitigating and adapting to climate change and providing high-quality places to live for a growing and diversifying populace. This research project will help increase the ecological functioning of cities by addressing a fundamental question: In a complex urban/metropolitan system, what are the synergies and tradeoffs between conserving biodiversity and providing ecosystem services to people? The investigators will focus on the Green Infrastructure Vision of the Chicago Wilderness alliance, a conservation consortium of more than 240 organizations. The Green Infrastructure Vision, designed to implement the Chicago Wilderness Biodiversity Recovery Plan, is already influencing long-range land planning throughout the Chicago metropolitan region. The Green Infrastructure Vision identifies 1.5 million acres of recommended resource protection areas -- lands that need careful planning and management in order to protect the 360,000 acres of already protected lands and waters in the Chicago Wilderness network. Two postdoctoral researchers will work with the ULTRA-Ex research team (who come from a diversity of research institutions and governmental agencies) to accomplish two major objectives. Their first objective is to conduct a critical examination of the connections between the biodiversity-recovery goals of the region-wide Green Infrastructure Vision and the delivery of critical ecosystem services to human communities throughout the Chicago region. The researchers will examine links between social and ecological systems in the context of biodiversity management, green-infrastructure conceptualization and implementation, and the delivery of ecosystem services from cultural to biogeochemical. Their second major objective is to develop a multi-faceted, interactive, web-based Chicago hub of urban environmental researchers. This hub will include an interactive platform for managing data, communicating research findings to planners and the public, and collaborating and interacting with scientists and practitioners. It will also be an umbrella and focal point for urban ecosystem research and policy, and it will partner with regional education and outreach programs.This research project will develop new information about biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, green-infrastructure planning, asset-based analysis, and resilience theory. A novel facet of the project is the application of scientific tools to investigate the relationship between the protection of biodiversity and the delivery of a range of ecosystem services in a complex metropolitan landscape. The project will provide scientifically objective information to strengthen planning and conservation practices in the City of Chicago and the entire Chicago metropolitan region. Needs faced in the Chicago region are faced in other urban areas. Project results therefore will have utility for understanding the dynamics of complex socioecological systems of other regions of the U.S. and the world. The research project will strengthen the infrastructure of science by integrating research groups consisting of ecologists, urban planners, and social scientists in several universities, a federal agency, and the city of Chicago administration. The project also will strengthen interdisciplinary education in the social and natural sciences through a Chicago-wide interdisciplinary graduate course taught by faculty, researchers, and planners from several institutions. This award was funded as an Urban Long-Term Research Area Exploratory (ULTRA-Ex) award as the result of a special competition jointly supported by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service.