In many cities, schoolyards offer a multitude of opportunities for landscape revitalization, public engagement, and biological diversity. Schools may act as a medium and method to synthesize urban ecological design through collaborative efforts that may integrate science, design, and decision-making in the built environment. Through the patch dynamics theoretical framework, the objective of our active research program is to recouple urban landscape mosaics through the intentional codesign of both physical environments and institutional processes. Project Birdland was the result of an interdisciplinary collaboration that utilized concepts in landscape design to provide a more complex, yet useable greenspace for education and increase local biodiversity in Baltimore, Maryland. Prior to design efforts, we collected data on teacher preferences, school and community needs, and local bird community diversity. In August 2017, Project Birdland hosted a Community Build Day at which students, teachers, and community members transformed the schoolyard by planting more than 3,000 plants and installing student-designed nest boxes for a variety of native cavity nesting bird species. We plan to resample data in summer 2018 to evaluate any annual changes post-implementation. We are currently conducting a spatial analysis and suitability mapping of Baltimore to determine other potential Project Birdland schools.
Results/Conclusions
Project Birdland’s design research effort is offered as a case study that presents the mechanisms of landscape synthesis that engages both the analytical and experiential dimensions of urban landscapes. In this talk, we describe the foundations of this collaboration, design process and implementation, and data collection for urban biodiversity and environmental education. In Year 0, we documented 11 bird species in the immediate schoolyard and 26 bird species in the surrounding neighborhood. Teacher surveys indicated that their students would be interested in learning about the schoolyard as a part of the urban landscape and the site can be used as a site for community service activities; yet only a subset (86%) indicated that they would use the schoolyard in their teaching. Through our spatial analysis, we propose the concept of ‘Park Schools’ as a recoupled mosaic type in urban landscapes. Project Birdland is an ongoing research collaboration that aims to highlight the potential for other urban schools to support vibrant urban socioecological systems as a platform for collaborative civic action. We will share tips and suggestions as to how other urban schools may utilize our Park Schools concept to enact similar changes in their communities.