Translating scientific knowledge into management actions for cities can effectively occur when policy-makers, communities, scientists, and other stakeholders from many sectors and disciplines jointly collaborate on research and management. One approach to navigating complex transdisciplinary collaboration is the designed experiment framework, a process where ecologists and designers collaborate throughout the design process to develop interventions that study and shape urban systems. The Earth Stewardship Initiative (ESI) has conducted demonstration projects of this framework concurrently with four ESA Annual Meetings. Graduate students work on transdisciplinary teams to develop designed experiments for city projects. ESI demonstration projects provide opportunities for host cities to utilize the collective scientific expertise ESA meetings bring and also serve as experiential training for urban ecology researchers. During the 2015 Annual Meeting in Baltimore, ESI Fellows contributed to three on-going city projects, including planning for Patterson Park. Fellows drafted designed experiments that were incorporated into the park’s Final Master Plan and further developed by collaborators.
I will discuss the Baltimore ESI demonstration project's implications as an educational exercise. Through feedback provided by participating past Fellows, I will revisit the key challenges and takeaways Fellows first identified from the 2015 project and explore the application and relevance of their findings to the participants’ diverse career paths five years after the project's completion.
Results/Conclusions
2015 Fellows currently work in a variety of roles within multiple sectors and disciplines, including landscape architecture, public policy, wildlife biology, wilderness planning, renewable energy development, public health, urban planning, and community outreach. A unifying theme across participants’ careers is the increasingly transdisciplinary nature of their work in developing solutions to the complex socioecological challenges within cities and other human-dominated landscapes. The participants’ feedback illustrates that lessons learned from the ESI demonstration project continue to inform their professional work in both anticipated and unexpected ways. Key challenges experienced during the project also recur throughout participants' roles and disciplines, including the need to reassess and revise often throughout the design process and the challenges of distilling input from multiple stakeholders to identify and prioritize core issues. The demonstration project’s takeaways for overcoming challenges have provided a foundation of knowledge that remains directly applicable and iterative throughout the participants’ diverse careers, and this knowledge continues to develop into more nuanced and realized management strategies as past Fellows continue to gain experience, enhancing Fellows' skills as early-career professionals and furthering urban ecology's body of knowledge.