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地方和全球生态系统构成了重大挑战，并考验着治理的极限。新的城市增长可以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者跟上伴随而来的空间、政治和经济转型的步伐，同时减少城市发展对生态的不利影响。面对这些挑战，复杂的社会、政治和经济决策系统的新形式正在演变。这个跨学科的研究项目旨在提高对城市社会生态系统弹性的理解，其首要问题是：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？调查人员将重点关注俄勒冈州的波特兰和华盛顿州的温哥华，这两个城市在过去30年里在州、地区和地方各级不同的政策制度下发展起来。调查人员将继续研究三个主要问题：(1)地方和国家治理水平和政策的差异如何影响社会和生态景观的恢复力？(2)在不同干扰因素的影响下，不同土地利用规划策略对生态系统服务的提供有何影响？(3)监测生态系统服务的过程和结果如何有效地为城市社会生态系统提供可用的反馈回路？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内的统一活动。第一个研究项目将在区域尺度上研究治理对空间格局和发展时间的影响。第二个项目将审查发展和城市水质造成的干扰之间的关系。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，这两个项目都将研究城市和社区尺度上社会行动者之间的信息交换和使用以及互动。这两项交叉活动将补充研究项目，重点关注城市居民如何认识和管理城市生态系统资源。第一项活动将审查公民生态和信息以供决策。研究人员将在所有四个研究项目中应用一个共同的框架，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。该项目将建立和支持教师、青年和组织进行生态研究的网络，并将开发和测试有意义的措施，以了解教师和青年参与生态项目如何有助于城市恢复力。该项目的智力价值包括微观和中观层面关注人类感知、公民参与和生态系统服务之间的联系，以发展城市弹性，这将导致对人类系统如何适应干扰的见解。研究区是一个大都市区域，包含了治理体系截然不同、土地使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复杂的相互作用。波特兰的“可持续性神秘感”将受到社会经济和生态方面的仔细审查和评估。纳入人口增长和气候变化的外部力量，同时检查内部社区适应，将有助于确定未预料到的反馈循环或失败。该项目的更广泛影响将包括在城市地区建立一个跨越司法、学科、机构和地理界限的学习者网络。研究结果将由有意利用综合管理办法所产生的协同作用的城市和大都市机构在实验和体制上加以落实。这些结果将有助于打破过去社会经济和生态思维之间的分歧，并有助于提高对人类治理如何影响城市地区社会生态弹性的控制因素的理解和应用。该奖项是由国家科学基金会和美国农业部林业局联合支持的一项特殊竞赛的结果，作为城市长期研究区域探索奖（ULTRA-Ex）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.