Joshua Abbott, M.Phil. - US grants

Rapid population and physical expansion of cities worldwide has increased the urgency for understanding the factors that result in urbanization and the consequences of urban expansion for human beings and the environment. Present understanding of urbanization as a coupled socioecological system is limited by inadequate knowledge of the type, quantity, and quality of ecosystem services delivered in metropolitan regions and how actors incorporate both considerations of ecosystem services and household preferences into management decisions. Ecosystem services provide a service and function that is scientifically measureable and derived from a scientific understanding of ecosystem structures or processes, such as cooling from tree canopy cover. Ecosystem preferences are measurements of what ecosystem services people are willing to pay for, such as being close to recreation areas or clean air. These preferences often are revealed in housing prices. This interdisciplinary research project will investigate how decision makers respond to and make land-use and water-use decisions based on measured and preferred ecosystem services on the wildland-rural-urban fringe surrounding urban areas in the arid southwest. A comparative, gradient approach using the metropolitan areas of Las Cruces and Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Phoenix, Arizona, as case studies will be employed. By examining three cities along population, economic, and physical gradients in an arid environment, this project should add to basic knowledge about scaling in the urbanization process in a resource scarce environment. Choosing a southwestern regional context will provide greater insight into the urbanization processes in desert cities, which are underrepresented in urban theory. Primary methods include stakeholder forums and focus groups with decision makers, hedonic modeling of houses prices and ecosystem service amenities, and biophysical modeling of ecosystem services.

The degree to which decision makers consider ecosystem services and preferences in their decisions remains unclear. In an era when urban sustainability is increasingly important for guiding policy, this project will address this understudied but critical aspect of urban governance. The project will provide new understanding about ecosystem services and preferences to practitioners in arid urbanizing regions, which they can use to formulate and facilitate best management practices. Proposed interviews and stakeholder forums will give decision makers and citizen groups a voice in how land and water should be managed on the rapidly growing fringe. The proposed activities also will allow the research team to assess which ecosystem services and preferences are important to stakeholders, so that future research can address those concerns. The activities and results will reach decision makers at the city, county, state, and federal levels as well as concerned citizen groups, real estate developers, and tribal groups. This award was funded as an Urban Long-Term Research Area Exploratory (ULTRA-Ex) award as the result of a special competition jointly supported by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service.

The livelihoods of fishermen who work in large marine ecosystems are heavily influenced by the variability inherent in biological and oceanic systems, as well as by the intrinsic uncertainty of economic and management structures. However, as fishermen adapt to these changes by moving across fisheries, their actions may strongly impact them and their communities, as well as influence local ecosystem dynamics. The linkages between environmental variability and ecological, economic, and social outcomes in marine ecosystems are poorly understood. Developing this knowledge is important so that regulators may adopt fisheries management approaches that allow fishermen to adapt to environmental variability while at the same time enhancing the social and economic value of fisheries and mitigating risks to both ecosystems and livelihoods. In this project, ecologists, economists and social scientists will collaborate and integrate primary survey research, modeling, and outreach to: 1) understand how environmental variability affects, and is affected by, linked social and ecological processes; 2) investigate how more integrated fisheries management can enhance social and ecological resilience; and 3) engage state and federal fisheries managers and fishing communities in the development and application of modeling approaches to better achieve ecological and social goals.

To better operationalize ecosystem-based fisheries management, the researchers will use time series approaches to identify the effects of environmental variability on fish population dynamics and spatial distributions, and to identify 'portfolios' of species whose productivity varies synchronously or asynchronously, in the context of the fisheries of the California Current marine ecosystem on the U.S. West Coast. To better understand fishermen's patterns of participation across multiple fisheries, this research will combine data from ethnographic interviews and structured surveys of fishermen, with data on fishing participation, revenues and costs, to develop an empirical model of fishing supply behavior that integrates economic motivations (e.g., profits, financial risks, and outside employment opportunities) with non-monetary considerations (e.g., psychological satisfaction from fishing or strong social ties to the fishing community). Finally, the researchers will integrate the model of fishing supply with models of the population dynamics of key fish stocks under environmental variability to create a coupled ecological-economic simulation model of West Coast fisheries. This model will be used by the researchers, in conjunction with fishery managers and stakeholders, to consider how alternative management approaches may enhance or hamper the resilience of the fishery by affecting fishermen's adaptive behavior. The research from this study would provide society benefits through providing an important tool to operationalize ecosystem-based fishery management, a stated priority for state and federal agencies.