Treesearch

How do stewardship groups contribute to the management of urban ecosystem services? In this paper, we integrate the research on environmental stewardship with the social-ecological systems literature to explain how stewardship groups serve as bridge organizations between public agencies and civic organizations, working across scales and sectors to build the flexible and multi-scaled capacity needed to manage complex urban ecosystems. Analyzing data collected from a survey of stewardship groups in New York City, combined with open-ended semi-structured interviews with representatives from...

In this paper we explore whether the enhancement of urban ecosystem services through large-scale, metropolitan tree-planting initiatives is being planned and executed as a component of traditional municipal government or represents new, transdisciplinary strategies in environmental governance. Drawing on qualitative interviews with stakeholders in six major cities (n = 58) we further explore institutionalization of these initiatives and relationships. While much current discourse posits government cannot "go it alone" in providing preventative, "front&...

Reserve site selection models can be enhanced by including habitat conditions that populations need for food, shelter, and reproduction. We present a new population protection function that determines whether minimum areas of land with desired habitat features are present within the desired spatial conditions in the protected sites. Embedding the protection function as a constraint in reserve site selection models provides a way to select sets of sites that satisfy these habitat requirements. We illustrate the mechanics and the flexibility of the protection function by embedding it in two...

As societies evolve, often the most appropriate response to the hazard must also evolve. However, such shifts in appropriate response to a hazard, whether at the individual or at the societal level, are rarely straightforward: Closing the gap between desired practice and current practice requires effective communication. Although there is a significant literature on how to encourage adaptation before an event and how to communicate during an event, there is less work tying the two together or on how to communicate shifts in larger scale societal response to a natural hazard. In this...

Many ecologists believe that there is a lack of foraging theory that works in community contexts, for populations of unique individuals each making trade-offs between food and risk that are subject to feedbacks from behavior of others. Such theory is necessary to reproduce the trait-mediated trophic interactions now recognized as widespread and strong. Game theory can address feedbacks but does not provide foraging theory for unique individuals in variable environments. ‘State and prediction-based theory’ (SPT) is a new approach that combines existing trade-off methods with routine...

In a study of post-fire logging effects over an 8 year period at Blacks Mountain Experimental Forest, salvage logging was conducted at varying levels of intensity after a 2002 wildfire event. In a designed experiment, harvest prescriptions with snag retention levels ranging from 0% to 100% in 15 experimental units were installed. Observations of standing snags and surface fuels were made 2, 4, 6, and 8 years after the fire. Fire-killed snags fell rapidly over time, leading to elevated surface fuel levels in areas where no salvage logging was done. The 1000 h and larger surface fuels were...

Although temporal variation in headwater stream chemistry has long been used to document baseline conditions and response to environmental drivers, less attention is paid to fine scale spatial variations that could yield clues to processes controlling stream water sources. We documented spatial and temporal variation in water composition in a headwater catchment (41 ha) at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, NH, USA. We sampled every 50m along an ephemeral to perennial stream network as well as groundwater from seeps and 35 shallow wells across varying flow conditions. Groundwater...

Partial timber harvest within riparian management zones (RMZs) may permit active management of riparian forests while protecting stream ecosystems, but impacts on herbaceous communities are poorly understood. We compared herbaceous plant community abundance, diversity and composition in RMZs along small streams in northern Minnesota, USA, among four treatments before harvest and 1 year and 9 years following treatment. Treatments included a no-harvesting control and three different treatments of the RMZs where the adjacent upland forest was clearcut: (1) an RMZ control, with no harvesting...