Civic environmental stewardship is an emerging topic of research and has implications for the management and distribution of biodiversity in regional landscapes. Stewardship organizations can assist, enable, influence, and enact actions that alter the social-ecological landscape found in cities and regions. Researching the structure and function of stewardship can offer insights into broader environmental governance. Previous work on stewardship organizations has focused within city boundaries (Svendsen and Campbell 2008, Fisher et al. 2012, Andersson et al. 2014). Examining stewardship through a regional lens can offer additional insights for understanding how environmental governance may vary across and, in turn, influence the larger landscape.
This paper examines recent New York City region Stewardship Mapping and Assessment Project (STEW-MAP) data from 2017, which surveyed civic environmental organizations throughout the larger NY-NJ-CT-PA Combined Statistical Area. While a larger sample was surveyed in NYC, for this regional analysis, we limit the sample considered to only registered 501(c)(3) organizations in environmental categories (n = 230 responses out of 4,571 surveyed). We summarize survey results by urban, suburban, and exurban land use/land cover (Theobald 2001). From these datasets, we can examine the difference in organizational focus, structure, and associated environmental outcomes.
Results/Conclusions
From these data, we find differences in stewardship structure and function across the urban-rural gradient. For stewardship activities, conservation as a stewardship function was more emphasized in suburban and exurban areas, whereas management was more emphasized in urban areas. Differences in site types stewarded (e.g., street tree, backyard, park, forest) align with differences in land cover in urban, suburban, and exurban areas. Examining stewardship collaboration networks, we find some collaboration spans the region, but most collaboration is more locally-based. Some, but not all, reported social and environmental outcomes also varied by location; suburban and exurban organizations were more often to rate their efforts on land protection higher than urban counterparts, while urban organizations more often rated their effect on public participation as high. We conclude by discussing the role of stewardship within environmental governance and implications for regional biodiversity and ecosystem function.