ULTRA-Ex: Collaborative Research: How Do Feedbacks Between Governance and Biophysical Systems Affect the Resilience of Urban Socioecological Systems?

城市集中度的快速增长对当地和全球生态系统构成了重大挑战，并考验着治理的极限。新的城市发展会减少和破坏非人类栖息地，引入外来生物，并严重改变能量流动和营养循环，而城市发展严重影响水文循环和空气质量，降低生态系统吸收干扰的能力。这些挑战将要求规划者、项目设计师和环境管理人员跟上随之而来的空间、政治和经济变革的步伐，同时减少城市发展对生态的不利影响。面对这些挑战，新形式的复杂社会、政治和经济决策系统正在演变。这一跨学科研究项目旨在提高对城市社会生态系统复原力的理解，主要问题是：人类治理和生物物理系统如何对城市社会生态系统中的压力和脉冲干扰做出互动反应？调查人员将把重点放在俄勒冈州的波特兰和华盛顿州的温哥华，这两个城市是在过去30年里在州、地区和地方各级不同的政策制度下发展起来的。研究人员将探讨三个主要研究问题：(1)地方和州政府治理和政策水平的差异如何影响社会和生态景观的弹性？(2)替代土地利用规划战略如何影响生态系统服务的提供，以应对不同的干扰因素？(3)监测生态系统服务的过程和结果如何有效地在城市社会生态系统中提供可用的反馈循环？他们的研究设计将包括四个重点研究项目和两个项目范围的统一活动。第一个研究项目将审查治理对区域范围内发展的空间格局和时机的影响。第二个项目将审查发展引起的干扰与城市水质之间的关系。第三个项目将侧重于河岸植被的变化，第四个项目将侧重于绿色基础设施，两个项目都将审查信息的交流和使用以及城市和社区规模上的社会行为者之间的互动。这两项交叉活动将通过关注城市居民如何感知和管理城市生态系统资源来补充研究项目。第一项活动将研究公民生态和决策信息。研究人员将把一个共同的框架应用于所有四个研究项目，以研究生态信息如何反馈到社会决策中。第二项活动将使波特兰-温哥华地区的中学教师及其学生参与城市环境恢复和研究项目。该项目将创建和支持教师、青年和进行生态研究的组织组成的网络，并将开发和测试教师和青年参与生态项目如何有助于城市弹性的有意义的措施。该项目的智力价值包括微观和中观层面的重点，即在发展城市弹性方面，人类感知、公民参与和生态系统服务之间的联系，这将导致对人类系统如何适应干扰的洞察。该研究区域是一个大都市区，其中包括治理体系截然不同、土地利用政策截然不同的城市，非常适合分析和比较社会和生态系统之间的复杂相互作用。波特兰的“可持续发展之谜”将从社会经济和生态两个方面进行仔细审查和评估。纳入人口增长和气候变化的外部力量，同时检查社区内部适应情况，将有助于确定意外的反馈循环或失败。该项目的更广泛影响将包括在城市地区建立一个跨越管辖、学科、机构和地理边界的学习者网络。研究结果将由有意在综合管理方法中发现的协同增效的基础上发展的城市和大都市机构试验性和制度性地实施。这些成果应该有助于打破过去社会经济和生态思维之间的分歧，并有助于改善对控制人类治理如何影响城市地区社会生态复原力的因素的理解和应用。该奖项是由美国国家科学基金会和美国农业部林业局联合支持的一项特别竞赛的结果，作为城市长期研究区域探索(ULTRA-EX)奖的资助。

The rapid growth of urban concentrations poses major challenges to local and global ecosystems and tests the very limits of governance. New urban growth can reduce and fragment nonhuman habitats, introduce exotic organisms, and severely modify energy flow and nutrient cycles, while urban development severely affects hydrological cycles and air quality, reducing the capacity of an ecosystem to absorb disturbance. These challenges will require that planners, program designers, and environmental managers keep pace with the concomitant spatial, political, and economic transformations while reducing the adverse ecological impact of urban developments. In the face of these challenges, new forms of complex social, political and economic decision making systems are evolving. This interdisciplinary research project is designed to improve understanding of resilience in urban socioecological systems, with the over-arching question: How do human governance and biophysical systems respond interactively to both press and pulse disturbances in urban socio-ecological systems? The investigators will focus on Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver, Washington, two cities in a single metropolitan area that have developed over the last 30 years under contrasting policy regimes at the state, regional, and local levels. The investigators will pursue three major research questions: (1) How do differences in local and state levels of governance and policy affect the resilience of both social and ecological landscapes? (2) How do alternative land-use planning strategies affect provision of ecosystem services in response to different disturbance factors? (3) How effectively do the processes and outcomes of monitoring ecosystem services provide a usable feedback loop in urban socioecological systems? Their research design will consist of four focused research projects and two project-wide unifying activities. The first research project will examine governance effects on the spatial pattern and timing of development at the regional scale. The second project will examine relationships among disturbances resulting from development and urban water quality. The third project will focus on riparian vegetation changes, and the fourth project will focus on green infrastructure, with both examining the exchange and use of information and interactions among social actors at the city and neighborhood scales. The two cross-cutting activities will complement the research projects by focusing on how urban residents perceive and manage urban ecosystem resources. The first activity will examine civic ecology and information for decision making. The investigators will apply a common framework to all four research projects to study how ecological information feeds back into societal decision making. The second activity will engage secondary school teachers and their students in the Portland-Vancouver region in urban environmental restoration and research projects. The project will create and support networks of teachers, youth, and organizations conducting ecological research and will develop and test meaningful measures of how teacher and youth involvement in ecological projects contributes to urban resilience.The intellectual merit of the project includes micro-level and meso-level foci on the connections among human perceptions, citizen engagement, and ecosystem services in developing urban resilience, which should lead to insights about how human systems adapt to disturbance. The study area, a metropolitan region containing cities with contrasting governance systems and starkly different land-use policies, is well suited for analysis and comparison of complex interactions between social and ecological systems. Portland's "sustainability mystique" will be scrutinized and assessed both socioeconomically and ecologically. Inclusion of external forces of population growth and climate change while simultaneously examining internal community adaptations will help identify unanticipated feedback loops or failures. The broader impacts of this project will include creation of a network of learners in urban areas that cross jurisdictional, disciplinary, institutional, and geographic boundaries. Research findings will be put in place experimentally and institutionally by cities and metropolitan agencies interested in building on the synergies found in integrative approaches to management. These results should help break down past divisions between socioeconomic and ecological thinking and help improve understanding and application of factors controlling how human governance affects socioecological resilience in urban areas. 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.