The Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES) was initiated as an LTER project in 1997, designed to understand the controls on urban system structure and function, and how structure and function of the urban ecosystem affect one another. The proposed research will expand the first phase BES work by addressing three fundamental questions: 1) How do the spatial structures of socio-economic, ecological and physical features of 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 the BES system, how do these fluxes relate to one another and how do they change over the long term? 3) How can people develop and use an understanding of the metropolis as an ecological system to improve the quality of their environment and to reduce pollution to downstream air and watersheds? Conceptual frameworks motivating these questions include ecological, hydrologic and social patch dynamics, the human ecosystem framework and the role of exotics in community organization, as well as theories in socio-spatial relationships, resilience, biocomplexity and urban design.
Intellectual Contributions. The proposed research builds on data sets ranging from
paleoecological, through historic time frames, to simulation of future scenarios. Highlights of proposed new research include: 1) using a $1 billion Baltimore City program to improve sanitary sewer infrastructure as an experimental manipulation, 2) an integrated physical, biological and social analysis of an urban watershed restoration (Watershed 263) project funded by over $1 million in U.S. Forest Service and other sources, 3) continued development of the first urban micrometeorological flux tower for analysis of carbon and water fluxes, and 4) continued development of ideas about the ecology of prestige, where lifestyle groups rather than more traditional metrics such as race, income and education are used to explain variation in urban ecosystem structure and function. Integration of these efforts will be facilitated by continued development and use of a new, high-resolution urban land cover classification system (HERCULES), and by a series of models that operate at different scales for different questions.
Broader Impacts. BES research will exploit new, management-relevant environmental interventions, such as the Watershed 263 restoration initiative to explore the role of urban reforestation on stormwater management. Evaluation of improvements to Baltimore City’s sewer infrastructure will yield results broadly useful to managers and policy makers and to educators and community groups in the affected water- and sewer-sheds. Modeling of ecosystem services will be a hallmark of the new research, providing information useful and interesting to citizens and decision leaders. New BES education and outreach initiatives will include analyses of how formal and informal approaches to education facilitate the ability of people to think about the city as an ecosystem and development of new modules for the Urban Forest Effects (UFORE) model to evaluate the health of urban forests and their effects on energy use and water and air pollution. Education activities will build on successful curriculum development, teacher workshops and interactions with K-12 students, with special attention on reaching under-represented groups. Training outside the classroom will include summer internships and after school programs at community centers and city environmental centers, again including under-represented groups. Novel graduate training will focus on a new collaboration in urban design. Multi-city information transfer will be achieved through cross-site LTER site projects and through an Urban Ecology Collaborative.
