Social-ecological connectivity in urban ecosystems: What we have learned from 20 years of LTER research in Phoenix

Background/Question/Methods: Cities are designed, built, and managed as human habitat; Homo sapiens is effectively the ecosystem engineer of urban ecosystems, and people are central to the structure and functioning of these systems. For this reason, we posit that the most effective way to study cities as ecosystems is from a broadly holistic social-ecological perspective. For 20 years, the Central Arizona-Phoenix (CAP) LTER program has been studying Phoenix from this perspective. We thus define ecological connectivity in urban ecosystems from an interdisciplinary, social-ecological perspective. We track water as it enters the city, water in the city, and water leaving the city to quantify socio-hydrologic connectivity. The relationships between residents and their environment, which includes their yards, neighborhoods, and urban parks and open spaces, represent important forms of social-ecological connectivity. We quantify these relationships with the Phoenix Area Social Survey (PASS). Urban design links current and future social-ecological connectivity, and CAP research is informing design of a major urban revitalization project: Rio Salado 2.0. Rio Salado 2.0 seeks to create a corridor of terrestrial, aquatic, and wetland urban ecological infrastructure along 60 km of the Salt River in central Phoenix, with the goals of enhancing neighborhood and city-wide connectivity while stimulating economic activity.

Results/Conclusions: Socio-hydrologic connectivity in Phoenix includes the quality and quantity of drinking water consumed in this desert city. We study people’s perceptions of drinking water quality using PASS results and through concentrations of algal metabolites that produce odors. Though drinking water is relatively safe, public perceptions—such as those related to odor—inflate concerns about its safety. Meanwhile, residents express concerns about drought and, to a lesser degree, regional water consumption rates, yet they distant themselves and their local areas from water scarcity and associated conservation measures. Our research on stormwater management includes urban ecological infrastructure in the form of urban parks. These parks enhance social-ecological connectivity through their amenities as parks while also connecting people to the stormwater itself during the rare times when these parks are actually managing stormwater and preventing urban flooding. Urban water features, such as Tempe Town Lake, provide social-ecological connectivity via recreation while also stimulating economic growth. Constructed treatment wetlands connect urban water infrastructure back to the Salt River. Finally, our co-production of the design of the Rio Salado 2.0 urban revitalization project provides an important vehicle to incorporate 20 years of LTER knowledge into a more sustainable urban future for Phoenix.