Recipient Organization
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
(N/A)
ANN ARBOR,MI 48109
Performing Department
Resource Ecology & Management
Non Technical Summary
A fundamental challenge to urban sustainability is how best to incorporate and balance multiple environmental, social, and economic considerations into planning processes. Land use decisions are often narrowly driven by one particular interest or benefit. This project will help develop the science necessary for effective spatial planning in a climate-constrained era by developing an approach to GI maintenance and expansion that is truly inclusive, interdisciplinary and transferable. In terms of broader impact, hundreds of millions of dollars is being poured into redevelopment of the Detroit region, with GI expansion as a major centerpiece and decisions about where and how to expand GI will have ramifications for decades to come. This project has the potential to significantly shape this expansion in a manner sensitive to environmental and social justice, in addition to traditional environmental benefits. Moreover, it will enable us to evaluate the multi-functionality of current and proposed GI, and compare them with historical land use patterns. This will help organizations and initiatives understand the effects of GI interventions by benefit (e.g. stormwater, heat island, etc.), future climate-informed pathways, and the options for siting to maximize multifunctionality (i.e. a suite of benefits rather than one or two). The GIS data layers and approach developed by this project will serve as a foundation for larger urban sustainability research projects in the Detroit region and beyond.
Animal Health Component
50%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
20%
Applied
50%
Developmental
30%
Goals / Objectives
Detroit is a city-region in renewal, after decades of socio-economic recession, urban decline, high land vacancy, and depopulation. The Detroit Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) consists of six counties (4000 sq. mi) and has abundant vacant and abandoned residential, commercial, and industrial property. There are ambitious plans to demolish properties and 'shrink' the city by concentrating stabilization efforts in target neighborhoods. In October 2018, recognizing the urgent and potentially irreversible threat of climate change, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a special report calling for ambitious adaptive mitigation efforts to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. These ambitious "pathways", framed within the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, center on transformational strategies to reduce emissions, enhance the natural CO2 sinks and stimulate adaptation options that lead to more climate-resilient systems.One emerging strategy for urban regeneration and as a means to enhance resilience and adaptive capacity is to expand green infrastructure (GI) -- the network of urban forests, greenways, parks and protected river basins that weave through a city's environs. GI can be conceptualized as a network of hubs or nodes composed of larger green patches and links (such as tree-lined streets). Not necessarily a green matrix connected throughout an urban area; GI is often fragmented with isolated pockets of green space. The ecosystem benefits of healthy and extensive GI are many (e.g. reduced stormwater flows, improved water quality, carbon sequestration) and studies indicate urban GI can improve property values and have multiple social, economic, health, and psychological benefits.The maintenance of existing urban forests and planting of new ones has emerged as a primary GI expansion strategy in city-regions worldwide. In the Detroit MSA, this is taking place through projects and initiatives. Since the early 1990s, the city-region has expanded greenways to transform abandoned industrial infrastructure and with funds from the US Forest Service, the NGO Greening of Detroit is planting trees primarily to improve stormwater retention and to reduce water pollution in Detroit's regional watersheds.The goal of this project is to take advantage of the momentum and support decisions toward social and environmental sustainability, equity, resilience and justice.
Project Methods
The research is divided into three phases, one for each project objective:1. Quantify changes in Detroit MSA's GI over a 25-year period (1992-2018): Given climate benefits from urban GI are going to accrue more significantly using the scale of the city-region, we will map GI changes for the entire Detroit MSA (1992 - 2018). We will develop a methodological guide and research manual for GI classification, a rigorous validation methodology of this process and step-by-step instructions for calculating landscape metrics. Changes will be distinguished by devising a multi-seasonal, multi-temporal approach, employing Landsat data, auxiliary variables, spectral controlling and automated sampling extraction based on no-change areas. These automatically generated samples will serve as training (70%) and validation (30%) for the Random Forests modeling framework. A suite of meaningful landscape metrics will be calculated to provide information about the size, density, isolation, proximity, connectivity and aggregation of GI patches. Change detection in the form of cross classification will then be applied at the GI patch level. The rigorous documentation of trends in GI along with the explicit "from-to" land use/cover change information, over the years, will act as a baseline to answer research questions and test hypotheses related to the drivers of these changes (e.g. population flows, sprawl, land abandonment). This spatial analysis will draw on spatial data sets already been collected (see below).2. Develop and deploy robust sustainability criteria to identify optimal sites for expanding GI in the Detroit MSA: The results generated in Phase 1 provide the baseline data for this effort. Indicators will be classified in broader categories reflecting the multifunctionality of GI and the ecosystem services they entail. In collaboration with an interdisciplinary group of SEAS and UM faculty and Detroit community collaborators, we will identify and weight the ecological and socio-economic criteria used to identify future optimal parcels for conserving and planting urban forests. Potential SEAS faculty include: Ibanez (forests and climate change), Nassauer (urban landscapes), Moore (ecosystem services), Grese (ecological restoration), Taylor (environmental justice and food access), Mohai (urban exposure to toxic pollutants), and Burton (urban stormwater and water quality). Community partners the PI has engaged with include: SEMCOG, City of Detroit Sustainability and Planning Offices, Data Driven Detroit, Detroit Future City, Greening of Detroit and Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice. We will deploy these indicators at multiple spatial scales (e.g. census block, NSP target areas, and zip code level) to see how the results and priority areas shift accordingly. As a test case, PI Newell has used this multi-criteria analysis approach to identify prospective new urban agricultural sites in Detroit's lower east side.3. Delineate future climate-resilient pathways reflecting different climatic realities and multi-dimensionality of GI: Scenarios will reflect prospective climate-resilient pathways. These scenarios will consider different climate trajectories based on IPCC GHG futures (low, medium, high), the range of benefits provided by GI (e.g. CO2 sequestration, stormwater abatement, improved air quality, urban heat island amelioration, increased green space, and landscape connectivity) and the feasibility of implementation. Co-PI Rood and Great Lakes Integrated Sciences and Assessments (GLISA) students/researchers will apply climate modeling techniques for the Detroit MSA to provide realistic spatial variability of certain variables (such as precipitation and surface air temperature) for the different future scenarios.