Our NSF-funded Urban Long Term Research Areas – Exploratory (ULTRA-Ex) project, now in its second year, examines the role of governance for a pair of cities, Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington, which have developed over the past several decades under contrasting policy regimes at the state, regional, and local levels. We seek to find how differences in local and state levels of governance and policy affect the resilience of both social and ecological landscapes, and how monitoring ecosystem services may provide a usable feedback loop in urban socio-ecological systems. We are assessing multiple pathways through which human actions, governance systems, and the built and social infrastructure affect ecosystem services provided by landscape vegetation pattern and regional water quality. Our approach features three cross-cutting activities (landscape scale development patterns, civic ecology and environmental education) that examine both natural system variables and social outcomes. We also have three focused projects (water quality, stormwater management and urban riparian greenspace conservation) that primarily examine effects of social patterns and governance on natural system characteristics.
Results/Conclusions
Our cross-cutting activities are still in progress, and target both cities in a large scale residential survey, interviews of decisions makers and engagement with volunteers and teachers. In our focused projects, preliminary findings for water quality suggest that local land use, rather than regional governance, is the primary determinant of water quality in streams. Additionally, hedonic analyses show that water quality is correlated with property values in residential areas. For stormwater management, our preliminary findings suggest that while stormwater management strategies (e.g. bioswales) provide environmental benefits, the perception of their value by local citizens is mixed and possibly even negative, at least in the short-term following installation. We have also found that heavy metal accumulations (i.e. Cu, Pb, Zn, Cd) have not reached toxic levels in bioswale soils. For urban riparian greenspace conservation, while losses of riparian areas near streams have continued over the past two decades, the rates of those losses are slowing, and in Portland gains in riparian areas due to urban restoration efforts have outpaced riparian losses due to development in the most recent period of study (2002-2008). Overall, our preliminary findings indicate large variation in levels of civic engagement within each municipality, but general social and ecological differences between municipalities and states are not yet clear. We hope to resolve this general picture more clearly in our ongoing research.