1

CNH: Dynamics of Urban Coupled Natural- Human Systems: Novelty, Adaptive Capacity, and the Future of a Tropical City PROJECT DESCRIPTION

No other place offers a lens into the behavior of tightly coupled natural and human systems as a city. Urban systems exert a disproportional effect on ecosystems worldwide because of the large amount of energy and resources needed to sustain their people, machines, institutions, and infrastructure. However it is naive to believe that the effects of cities on ecosystems only occur outside a city in proportion to their ecological footprint, because the city also contains green infrastructure with vegetation, riparian zones, estuaries, forests, streams, and other ecological systems that also contribute to and affect the quality of human life. The high octane mixture of natural and social urban components with external resources that characterize urban systems is now supporting over 50 percent of humanity under conditions that range from the best to the worst that people of this planet can experience. It is imperative to focus on cities as coupled natural-human systems because of their increased importance for the welfare of people worldwide. Paradoxically, understanding the unsustainability of cities as coupled human-natural systems may be the key to understanding what resources and transformations are needed for sustainability globally (Ernstson et al. 2010a). Yet, the attention given to cities as coupled human-natural systems, or social-ecological systems (SES), is recent (see for example, Pickett et al. 2011 and Ernstson et al. 2010a).

Over the past three years, our group began a multidisciplinary study of the Río Piedras Watershed in the San Juan Metro Area (SJMA) of Puerto Rico (see sanjuanultra.org), and our attention was captured by numerous surprises emerging throughout the city that collectively suggest how novelty can lead to the development of adaptability and resilience in natural and social systems. We discovered novel systems emerging in aquatic, terrestrial and social subsystems in the city. By novel systems we mean ecological systems with mixed species composition of native and introduced species sensu Lugo (2009) and Lugo et al. (2012), as well as the new configuration of active networks of institutions and innovative responses in social-ecological governance (Svendsen and Campbell 2008,Ostrom 1998). For example, we observed species-rich communities of native and introduced aquatic species thriving in polluted riparian environments that have been heavily modified through canalization, filling, and stream channel modification (De Jesús-Crespo and Ramírez 2011a, 2011b, Ramírez et al. 2012). Novel forests with both native and introduced tree species grow rapidly and with high species diversity on abandoned city spaces(Lugo et al. 2011), and in both front and backyards in city neighborhoods introduced and native species are meeting alimentary needs for urban residents and forming novel ecosystems(see sanjuanultra.com/cnh-proposal/). In the social realm, we observed households adapting to flooding events, and witnessed new community and non-governmental efforts to implement sustainability initiatives (Muñoz-Erickson 2012). All these novel ecological and social systems have emerged as potential novel configurations for adaptation.

Given these dynamics, we ask, which system configurations hold the most promise for encouraging novelty and adaptive capacities in the future? What specific resources and capacities (e.g., physical, cultural, and institutional) are necessary for cities to reduce system vulnerabilities and respond to future pathways in the face of economic and climate change? Our overarching question is: How have the dynamics of urban SES produced vulnerabilities in the city over the past 60 years, and to what extent is the system now conducive to give rise to novel configurations (of natural and human systems) that can adapt to changes in the future? More specifically, how can we measure social-ecological feedbacks in such complex systems and develop necessary anticipatory knowledge and scenarios for adaptation?

We propose to examine the potential of urban SES as sources of novelty and innovation towards sustainability through the exploration of feedbacks and adaptive capacities at multiple temporal, spatial, and institutional levels in the city of San Juan. Adaptive capacities are defined by the ability of a system to cope with a changing environment by moderating potential effects of environmental change, taking advantages of opportunities for effective resource use, and dealing with the consequences of environmental change (Brooks et al. 2005). An extensive body of literature on resilience and adaptive

2

Figure 1.Map of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean (left panel), and the San Juan Metropolitan Area (SJMA) and the Río Piedras River Watershed (right panel). We stratified the SJMA into three major physiographic zones. The perimeter of the region corresponds to the political boundaries of the five municipalities that comprise the SJMA. The coastal zone of the city is delimited by the criteria of the Coastal Zone Management Plan of NOAA. The second zone is the dense urban zone (71 percent built-up land cover). The third zone is the more densely vegetated rural zone located above the 100-m elevation contour, with 77 percent of forest and other vegetation cover (Ramos González et al. 2005). On this base map of the city we located existing climatic and air quality stations. governance exists to guide these conceptual issues in complex SES (e.g., Ostrom 2009, Olsson et al. 2006), yet very few studies have looked at SES in urban systems. We will employ a diverse array of analytical, modeling and participatory methods to understand the processes, mechanisms, and connectivity of feedbacks between social and ecological components at multiple scales, and the extent they promote/inhibit innovation and system adaptive capacity. Models will be built based on primary social-ecological data that we have been collecting over the past two years on a network of SES sampling points across the city, and which we will expand to include more points for greater accuracy. The combination of natural and social science scenario modeling, empirical studies, and real-time data collection will allow us to ground-truth models as well as provide the infrastructure for evaluating social-ecological outcomes of future land use decisions and thus inform planning and policy for the city. San Juan (Fig. 1) is ideal to study the dynamics, novelty, and adaptive capacities of SES in urban environments for several reasons. San Juan’s small insular nature offers a microcosm to explore system responses in both the natural and the social systems to increases of natural disturbances as a result of climate change (Heartsill-Scalley et al. 2010, López-Marrero and Yarnal 2010). Also, we know from a long-term record of ecological science and monitoring that the tropical vegetation in this region respond positively to disturbance and at rapid rates compared to ecosystems in higher latitudes (Lugo 2008), which will allow us to quickly observe system responses to disturbances. Finally, Puerto Rico in general experienced a dramatic transformation from an agricultural to an industrial economy, due to an export-led industrialization strategy (Pantojas-García 1990), and later to a service economy. This transformation was accompanied by an increase in forest cover in the island (Lugo 2002) coupled by an increase in its consumption patterns, food imports, and its ecological footprint. Concurrently, San Juan grew from a compact urban core with little green infrastructure and surrounded by wetlands and agriculture to a sprawled suburban region that extended to contiguous municipalities and contains a large area of green infrastructure. The rapid gray to green transformation combined with the fact that this is a tropical biodiversity hotspot makes it a unique place to study urban natural dynamics, and inform policy in countries that are currently undergoing similar economic transformations in a globalizing world.

3

1. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK Various theoretical models have been proposed that conceptualize cities as SESs and allow scientists

to study urban systems as a unified whole, including Forrester’s (1969) and Newman’s (1999) pioneering works, the Human Ecosystem Framework (Machlis et al. 1997), the Integrated Social-Ecological System Model (Redman et al. 2004), and most recently, the Integrative Science for Society and the Environment Model by the Long Term Ecological Research Program (LTER Network 2007). These SES models are powerful because they advance theory and describe the structure and dynamics that emerge in urban environments with the interaction among plants, animals, microbes, people, technology, and institutions. We will take the SES approach a step further by using it as a tool to evaluate the state of the current SES, examine how management interventions affect the system (particularly its capacity for adaptation through generation of novelty), and anticipate potential trajectories of development and vulnerability given the system’s capacity to change in response to policy goals and external forcing factors. This aspect has been less developed in the literature even though it is often cited as the primary focus for explaining mechanistic aspects of urban SES. Yet, the dynamic and adaptive nature of urban systems remains poorly understood, as is their capacity for novelty and innovation. To achieve this we developed a framework that allows the integration of scientific concepts from a variety of disciplines, generates useful results, and facilitates understanding among citizens, managers, and scientists when formulating management decisions (Muñoz-Erickson et al. 2007, Vogel et al. 2007). For guidance we refer to the growing literature on vulnerability, novelty, and adaptive capacity as the link between understanding how SES function, and the long-term viability of the system given social and political goals (Turner et al. 2003, Olsson et al. 2006, Leach et al. 2012). Together, these concepts - vulnerability, novelty, and adaptive capacities, provide the common language and conceptual framework to integrate the various disciplinary perspectives in our research group.

For our conceptual framework (Fig. 2), we adopt an integrated approach to vulnerability that defines it both as a system property that determines the condition of the SES that is to be affected by a disturbance (Brooks et al. 2005, Downing et al. 2005) as well as encompassing the relations between social structures, human agency, and response (McLaughlin and Dietz 2008). This model has six main components: (1) external drivers that power and affect the city and its vulnerability, including climatic effects and declining availability and/or volatility of fossil fuels and other energy sources, as well as food, water, and materials; (2) the gray and (3) green infrastructure, which represent the basic physical structure of the city, (4) urban dynamics and metabolism, which describe urban development patterns and connectivity, and the processes of production and consumption in both social and natural subsystems of the SES; (5) governance, including the diverse set of actors and organizational networks beyond the state that allows cities to learn and improve their ability to respond to local and global conditions and improve delivery of services to people (Léautier 2006); and (6) social dynamics, including inequity, health, and poverty that affect social vulnerability and adaptive capacity. While this framework has been developed to reflect our group’s understanding of the SJMA SES, its categories are closely aligned with the SES models previously mentioned, thus allowing comparison to other urban SESs. The key differences of our framework are the explicit categories (in red in Fig. 2) that address the SES dynamics within a city including SES feedbacks, novelty, and adaptive capacity. There is also a larger scale feedback leading to adaptability, which is the one from the emerging novel system configuration back to the external resources needed to sustain that state. A Focus on Adaptive Capacities and Novelty in Social-Ecological Systems

Adaptive capacity provides the link between social and ecological system condition, policy goals, and future development trajectories. Like vulnerability, we understand adaptive capacity as a concept that describes the condition of the SES, as well as its ability to maintain ecological and social processes over time and in response to changing external forces. In systems science, adaptive capacity is considered a crucial property to maintaining and building resilience such that systems can maintain its characteristic composition, organization, and function overtime while remaining economically viable and sustaining

4

Figure 2. Urban Social-Ecological System (SES) framework explained in the text. The components in red are the new focus areas of our interdisciplinary research in the city of San Juan: SES feedbacks, novelty, and adaptive capacity at multiple temporal and spatial scales.

human communities (Costanza 1992). However, although resilience theory involves the notion that systems can have multiple stable states, adaptive capacity assumes that the system ultimately seeks one state over others, thus ignoring other possible states that may be socially undesirable or which fail to produce novel emergent properties (i.e., ecosystem services). Social-ecological systems are unique in how they function and evolve because a key agent in the system — humans —actively construct, adapt, and frame the development patterns and futures of society (McLaughlin and Dietz 2008). A simple and recent example of how humans quickly adapt to changing conditions occurred in New York City after hurricane Sandy when it was realized that emergency power generators should not be in basements where they can flood and cease to function as intended.

To apply these notions to growing or declining cities, we need a comprehensive understanding of both the drivers of SES change, the feedbacks and emergent properties of such change, and the resources devoted to adapting to change and pursuing future opportunities and improvements in quality of life. Understanding how SES configurations emerge, specifically feedbacks within the SES, is therefore crucial to tap the innovative and adaptive capacity in these systems. Adaptive capacity, as applied to human social systems, is determined by the ability of institutions and networks to learn and store knowledge, maintain flexibility in decision-making and problem-solving, and the existence of power structures that are responsive and consider the needs of all stakeholders (Resilience Alliance 2009). Social-ecological analysis of archeological cases have revealed, for instance, that circulation of information and resources among multiple spatial scales and organizational levels has been critical to the resiliency and adaptive capacities of large societies in the past (Redman and Kinzig 2003). Building adaptive capacity in urban governance is a crucial element in reducing vulnerabilities and transitioning towards sustainability (Folke et al. 2002). As such, we seek to analyze adaptive capacities in social-ecological systems by examining the structure of social networks, information flows, and decision-making systems of land use decision-makers as it pertains to ecosystem services and properties derived from different gradients of green infrastructure (e.g., non-managed, managed, native, novel) in the city at multiple institutional levels - individual, neighborhood, community/sectors and municipal.

5

Our approach to exploring novelty and adaptive capacities in social-ecological systems involves a normative (value-based) dimension that previous studies on SES have ignored. We recognize that there are multiple socially desirable or undesirable state domains, that produce different benefits or ecosystem services to people, and these domains are defined and maintained by political values, institutional structures and cultural factors (Norton 2005, Leach et al. 2012). Therefore, understanding SES dynamics also involves the identification of new and desirable, yet sometimes conflicting, development trajectories, and the potential of the SES to move towards any one of them. Specific emphasis will be placed on understanding how governance by different organizations and the prescriptive solutions they propose interact with ecosystems and communities of different vulnerabilities. This is the basis for evaluating existing adaptive capacities and the extent to which the system is capable of producing novel conditions in both social and ecological systems.

The conceptual framework presented here will advance theory on SES through its explicit focus on the dynamics and feedbacks of and between the natural and human systems in the city. We take this one step further by considering cultural and institutional elements that are critical to building novelty and adaptive capacity as integral parts to the sustainability of the SES system. Specifically we will evaluate how the different SES configurations we observe in the city respond to scenarios of change based on different visions of the city as defined by different sectors of urban society – citizens, planners, government officials, scientists, businesses, residents, etc.—and the solutions they provide to social vulnerabilities (flooding, temperature increase). In addition we will examine their preferences towards green infrastructure configurations and the services it provides and, how these preferences relate to the different city visions. Vulnerability assessments, SES dynamics, and scenarios of adaptation are at the cutting edge of the emerging sustainability science (Turner et al. 2003, Salas Zapata et al. 2011), which gives us an opportunity to advance the field with relevant studies in San Juan by identifying and quantifying indicators of vulnerability and adaptive capacity in relation to SES response. Finally, most large-scale integrated urban research has focused on temperate cities and the study of a city in the tropics will provide perspective to a network of temperate and boreal ones

2. SES RESEARCH APPROACH: Questions, Hypotheses, and Work Plans.

Our research team is comprised of more than 20 researchers, educators, and students from the natural and social sciences (see Table 1 for a sub-set of investigators that are part of this proposal) that have been working closely over the last three years to build the necessary intellectual, organizational, sampling, and technical infrastructure to understand the social-ecological dynamics of the city of San Juan and its main watershed, the Río Piedras River Watershed (RPRW). To ensure integration of our intellectually diverse group, we built an organizational infrastructure that relies on building common vocabularies (e.g., glossary of cross-cutting terms), collaboration principles, synthesis workshops, field trips to sampling sites, and sub-projects with paired teams of natural and social scientists leading the group. The project also employs a participatory research approach in which organizations and individuals from multiple sectors (governmental agencies, city planners, non-governmental organizations, private sector, and community groups) have participated at various points of the research, education, and outreach process. Overall, close to 30 organizations and individuals have participated in our collaborative research process.

We developed a nested sampling scheme to address the multi-scale nature of our SES and ensure a priori integration of the various disciplines as we study and collect data about the city (Fig. 3). We organize our questions in terms of extensive and intensive analytical approaches (sensu Zimmerman et al. 2009) and use the watershed and sub-watershed as the focus of extensive and intensive studies, respectively. The extensive study explores the temporal and spatial relationships between social, infrastructural, governance, and biophysical processes in the RPRW based on historical information and land use/land cover data, and new data collection and synthesis of urban development patterns and governance regimes through spatial modeling at the level of the watershed. The intensive study is aimed at gathering primary information about the management practices, social institutions, and socioeconomic,

6

cultural, and ecological features along gradients of human influence across sub-watersheds. Intensive studies allow us to address mechanisms and feedbacks that operate within urban systems using smaller spatial scale than those addressed at the watershed scale.

In addition, intensive studies allow the direct engagement of community members in sampling activities. Thus we will analyze the SJMA as a nested study area that includes at its core the RPRW and its sub-watersheds, and extends progressively into larger units in the future, such as the municipality of San Juan and the whole SJMA. For both the extensive and intensive approaches we follow the SES components of our conceptual framework (Fig. 2). We specifically address how feedbacks between natural and social elements generate or prevent vulnerabilities and also how these interactions relate to ecosystem functions and services within the RPRW. Thus, in addition to understanding how the state and condition of the SES has changed over time, we seek to understand (1) what types of interventions (e.g., individual and governance decision-making) influence the state and direction of the SES in the future, (2) how the system responds or adapts, and (3) what would be the consequences to ecosystem and social health. Crucial to our social-ecological approach is the establishment of a GIS sampling network across the RPRW (Fig. 3) based on biophysical and social criteria that our team deliberated and agreed upon. All

new social-ecological data that we collect for the extensive and intensive analysis described below will use the same points. Therefore, we will use our sampling network as the infrastructure in which our ecological and social scientists interact; to allow us to zoom in to a fine resolution to analyze the data that are spatially precise, and to zoom out to a coarser resolution to analyze data that are less spatially precise. In addition, we have collected a considerable amount of information and data that was already being sampled in the SJMA, as is typical of many other urban areas, and we created a synthesis of some of these data in our webpage. These environmental and ecological data are being collected by different organizations for different reasons and with different levels of spatial precision. Thus, we developed a central clearinghouse/structure that will allow for Quality Assurance/Quality Control (QA/QC) and long-term archiving and synthesis of data for the city. This information will be the basis for the exchange of information with other organizations and collaborators in San Juan.

Figure 3.Social-ecological sampling grid for the RPRW and San Juan. The yellow boundary delineates the municipality and the colored area delineates the watershed and sub-watersheds of the RPRW. The 13 orange circles are the half-kilometer buffer surrounding each point.

7

Our research on the SES characteristics and vulnerabilities of the RPRW thus far has revealed that trends and patterns of development in the RPRW are compromising San Juan’s future and quality of life for its residents. For example, the RPRW used to be the city’s main watershed and supplier of gravity-fed water for its residents but in a matter of six decades the watershed has been completely transformed and no longer provides this important service. We can also ascertain that the city’s current infrastructure is making its residents vulnerable to flooding, for example, and that the less privileged groups are carrying the burden of these land use legacies. The empirical and simulation models we have conducted in the RPRW revealed that numerous communities especially those with lower income and education are now vulnerable to climate change (San Juan ULTRA-Ex 2012), and quantifiable average annual damages in property of $20 million and $38.9 million are estimated when future conditions are considered (Lugo et al. 2011). Not only has the city’s adaptive capacity been reduced, but also environmental injustices have been produced. Given the urgency of flooding to city residents, we propose to build the overall SES dynamic model by first understanding the interactions and feedbacks between the green and gray infrastructure configurations that have led to increase flood risk at the scale of the RPRW for the extensive component of this proposal, yet still be able to uncover other key feedbacks (e.g., biodiversity loss, climate change, water quality degradation) associated with land use/land cover change at finer spatial scales, such as households and communities, through the intensive component.

Table 1. PI, Co-PIs, and Senior Personnel

Name Affiliation Relevant Specialties Ariel E. Lugo, PI FS IITF Ecosystem ecology, forest ecology, wetlands, synthesis. Tischa A. Muñoz-Erickson, Co-PI FS IITF Adaptive governance, social networks, interdisciplinarity José Seguinot-Barbosa, Co-PI UPR-MS GIS, land conversion, social vulnerability to climate change Elvia Meléndez-Ackerman, Co-PI UPR-RP Plant animal interactions, bioconservation Luis Santiago, Co-PI UPR-RP Environmental economics, environmental planning Senior Personnel Tomás A. Carlo Penn State Animal-plant interactions, landscape & community ecology Carmen M. Concepción UPR-RP Environmental planning and governance Carlos García-Quijano URI Ecological anthropology, social science methodology

Juan Giusti-Cordero UPR-RP Social and environmental history, agrarian history, Rio Piedras

Tamara Heartsill-Scalley FS IITF Riparian zones, Plant ecology, Multivariate analyses Pablo Méndez-Lázaro UPR-MS Geography of water resources; meteorology Ileana Quintero UPR-RP K-12 Education Alonso Ramírez UPR-RP Stream ecology, stream biomonitoring Robert G. Pontius CU Spatial dynamic modeling Support Personnel

VíctorCuadrado-Landrau Thinkamap GIS & web mapping developer; spatial data infrastructure and database design

Olga Ramos FS IITF GIS; geospatial analysis and processing; remote sensing; Green Infrastructure mapping

FS IITF = Forest Service, International Institute of Tropical Forestry; UPR-MS = University of Puerto Rico Medical Sciences; UPR-RP = University of Puerto Rico – Río Piedras; Penn State = The Pennsylvania State University; URI = University of Rhode Island; CU = Clark University

2.1 Extensive SES Analysis: For this component we seek to understand how novel green infrastructure configurations have evolved in the watershed and to what extent they can contribute to diminishing the vulnerability of the city’s social and ecological communities to flooding (illustrated in

8

bottom of Fig. 4). Analyzing transformations of urban SESs across temporal scales can highlight sources of novelty and innovation towards sustainability. We will analyze the historical legacies of land use/cover dynamics to understand the production of flooding as a key vulnerability that the RPRW is facing and the potential of the system to re-configure itself through the use of combined environmental history approaches and GIS modeling of alternative future states. We will evaluate what novel SES configurations may arise given existing resources, capacities, and physical limitations. Our question is: How have interactions of biophysical, socio-economic, and institutional factors shaped the vulnerability of natural and human communities in the land cover/land use context of the RPRW SES for the past 60 years, and to what extent is the system now conducive to give rise to novel configurations (of human and natural systems) that can adapt to changes in the future? We hypothesize that while the people and neighborhoods in San Juan have become increasingly vulnerable to flooding because of extensive land use transformations in the past, novel configurations of social and ecological communities and their response to ameliorate vulnerabilities (having emerged over time) can enhance the overall SES potential to adapt to future changes. (Lugo, Seguinot-Barbosa, Giusti-Cordero, Méndez-Lázaro, Ramos, Pontius, Hall, Muñoz-Erickson). To date, the only official approach taken to address the flooding problems of San Juan is the channelization of rivers and creeks within the city, including the Río Piedras, the largest river in San Juan. Such a project involving the US Army Corps of Engineers began its design phase in the 1960s and is under construction today. However, the project has evolved as the city itself developed in ways that are both consistent and inconsistent with a channelized river. There was a population reduction in the city and an unexpected increase in green infrastructure both of which will favor a channelization strategy. Working against the channelization was urban expansion into critical areas, including the right of way of the canal, and changes in land use/cover and ecological values that make the channelization alternative less socially acceptable.

There are green infrastructure solutions that have not been explored for the city. The land use plan for San Juan emphasizes the conservation of green areas in the headwaters of the watershed as a way to manage stream sedimentation and protect downstream communities from flooding. However, we have also discovered through morphological pattern analysis of vegetation cover for 2004 that green area in the lower parts of the watershed has been increasing and that by 2010 it exceeded 50% of the city. Moreover, the yards of individual residential areas emerged as a critical fraction of the green infrastructure of the city along with common green areas associated to neighborhoods and communities. A crucial link missing from current governmental planning analysis and solutions to the problem of flooding is the role that these novel ecosystems in the lower parts of the watershed could play in ameliorating flooding risks to people. However, different dynamics may occur in the household level. After examining three neighborhoods in the Río Piedras watershed, Ramos, Villanueva and Santiago (In review) found a significant green area reduction in two lower income neighborhoods when compared to a mid to high income neighborhood. Such a reduction may make poor downstream communities more vulnerable to flooding.

We focus our historical analysis on the past 60 years because that time frame includes the transformation of the RPRW, specifically in the lower parts where the tributaries confluence was changed. We will compare high resolution land cover maps developed for 2004 and 2010 with the spatial outcomes of historical events to establish how different periods of city development influenced land cover. We will use critical time periods (1930s to 1940s, 1950s to 1970s and 1990s to present) to examine the dynamics and trigger events where the process of transformation took place. Then we will explain both these regular and abrupt patterns of historical, cultural, and ecological change at multiple scales both qualitatively and quantitatively (Alo and Pontius 2008). This will help us understand the past historical drivers of the system, so that we may consider which factors are likely to be important in the future. Figure 4 (top) shows the specific feedbacks associated with these dynamics as a subset of the more complex social-ecological system model we have developed for the entire RPRW. Humans feedback into the green infrastructure by allotting more space to urban natural systems (flow 4) or actively managing the system (flow 5). Humans can also reduce the area of natural systems, thus stressing their delivery of ecosystem services (flow 6). Feedbacks from natural systems to humans

9

include providing food (flow 2), mitigating flood control (flow 1), or stressing (flooding) the social system (flow 3). Flow 7 illustrates how perturbations such as hurricanes stress both social and ecological systems. All these fluxes and feedbacks are regulated in part by land allocation to green infrastructure to the city, thus our focus on land use/cover changes. We will examine how floods and hurricanes during these periods interacted with human transformations through land use decisions that modified the location and surrounding lands along the main channels of the Río Piedras River to understand how existing land use configurations that are prone to increased flooding have evolved over time and explore the extent that novel ecosystems emerging in the lower parts of the watershed (e.g., green areas in yards and other new urban forests) could be part of the solution in reducing vulnerability and building adaptive capacity in the face of climate change. We expect that, in some respects, natural changes had diminished effects; in others their effect was multiplied.

To examine these dynamics, we will compile data and analyze historical rainfall episodes and floods, landslides, droughts, etc. and their relationship with the channelization of the Río Piedras River. We will identify the relevant census units: communities, subdivisions for analysis, and identify natural and cultural features of the region at different zones within the lower parts of the watershed and San Juan Bay. Historical analysis methods will include analysis of archival and Internet resources of land uses during the various time periods, the social units associated with the main land uses at the time, and the environmental and natural processes (e.g., flooding frequencies, rainfall data). Data sources will include historical census data available for 1910 to 1940, aerial photographs from the Department of Transportation and Public Works, series beginning in 1936 to 1970, USGS quadrangles: from earliest year available (1928) through 1970, historical documents from the Puerto Rico General Archive, US Census Bureau manuscript schedules, newspaper archives, and oral history interviews of elderly residents of communities along the watershed.

A key challenge to carrying out the historical land use/land cover change analysis we are proposing is a lack of accurate historical information and data of land use patterns — specifically, land uses in the 1930’s. We developed a computer program to deal with 1930 air photos and focus attention on the pixels that merit further examination. The computer program reads a time series of raster maps where each map has the same set of land categories. The state and city have not had the capability of producing historical land use data to calibrate and validate the land use models they currently use. We propose here to improve these capacities through developing highly accurate historical land use maps essential to understanding the social-ecological evolution of the watershed and more accurately explore through models what the consequences would be of different green and gray configurations toward addressing the problem of flooding.

Once we have analyzed land use/land cover change over time, we will examine the effects of different configuration scenarios of RPRW green infrastructure and the flood control services that they provide. We propose to use GEOMOD, a GIS-based dynamic model for simulating land change over time (Hall et al. 1995, Pontius et al. 2001, Pontius and Malanson 2005). GEOMOD can simulate scenarios of future transitions from one land category to another based on either extrapolation of historic trends or visions of future urban development derived from stakeholder preferences and expectations. GEOMOD can assess the relative importance of spatially–explicit factors that explain the pattern of historic development across the landscape. We will use a new optimization routine to help identify the factors that explain historic development patterns across the RPRW, and compare those with information from stakeholder interviews concerning anticipated future changes in the city and for the river, including the channelization plans by the US Army Corps of Engineers and scenarios that include using green infrastructure. The outputs from GEOMOD can serve as the input to a hydrological and climate change model, so that we can link the changes in the land cover with changes in the hydrograph and then feedback these changes into our climate change model to assess whether these alternative solutions to flood control provide adaptation options and reduce social vulnerability to future flooding and sea level rise effects as a result of climate change. The extensive SES approach allows us to understand how novel green infrastructure configurations have evolved at the level of the system, or the watershed in this case. However, we need to examine feedbacks within the system to explore the internal dynamics and configurations that build

10

Figure 4. The basic configuration of a social- ecological system is shown in the top panel to highlight four examples of feedbacks (flows 1, 3, 4, and 6), two fluxes between social and ecological subsystems (flows 2 and 5), and the effect of disturbances such as hurricanes (flow 7). All seven interactions between the social and ecological subsystems are addressed in this proposal. The notion of how novelty begets adaptability in the social ecological system is illustrated above. The basic social ecological configuration of the present (left) contains vulnerabilities that developed historically. Subsystem components and actors don’t change the basic configuration of the system but generate novelty and choices that change the relative magnitudes of fluxes and interactions within the system. This results in alternative solutions to environmental and social problems and for dealing with environmental change that through choice, learning, selection and adaptability lead to system states with increased capabilities and adaptability.

11

adaptive capacity, and hence, which interventions are necessary to foster SES novelty in the future. We will explore this through intensive analysis of green area configurations at multiple institutional levels. 2.2. Intensive SES Analysis: Analyzing feedbacks of SES configurations at multiple scales are crucial to understand the underlying dynamics that allow or inhibit novel properties from emerging. The green infrastructure of a city is a set of interconnected habitats that provide important ecological functions to the urban ecosystem as well as benefits to humans (Benedict and McMahon 2006). New governance structures are emerging in cities like New York to manage and protect green areas along the lines of civic innovation —new forms of civic organization where people see themselves as co-creators of governance action (Boyte 2004) — that suggest that these novel configurations may be important for building adaptive capacity because they bring new resources, knowledge, and ideas for sustaining urban ecosystem services (Svendsen and Campbell 2008). A central challenge to sustaining and managing ecosystem services adaptively, however, lies in addressing scale mismatches between ecological processes, green infrastructure maintenance, and the governance processes that manage the infrastructure (Ernstson et al. 2010b). Indeed, in other cities researchers have found that individuals tend to dominate at smaller green scales while institutions dominate at large green scales (Kinzig et al. 2005), thus mid-scale linkages or structures that can connect across horizontal and vertical scales, are key to for governance at the city SES level (Ernstson et al. 2010b). Following these ideas, we propose to delineate appropriate measures of social and ecological adaptive capacities of different green area configurations at multiple institutional and physical scales (e.g., household-yards, neighborhood/community-common green areas; municipal-landscape) and integrate these to understand feedbacks between social and ecological systems (Fig. 5). Feedbacks will be studied by examining the linkage between land use decision-making and practices (e.g., yard management decisions) in relation to ecosystem services derived from different gradients of green infrastructure (e.g., non-managed, managed, abandoned, native, novel). Through this multi-tier approach we will answer this question: How do feedbacks in land use decisions vary across spatial and institutional levels – residential, neighborhood, municipality and city – in the RPRW SES and to what extent do they exhibit novel emergent properties? We hypothesize that: Community-green area and residential-yard configurations, to the extent they are functionally connected, can contribute to SES adaptive capacity through new knowledge, visions, and linkages across vertical (from individual to municipal) and horizontal (from yards to gradients of green area management across the city) scales. (Santiago, Meléndez-Ackerman, Muñoz-Erickson, Carlo, Concepción, Heartsill-Scalley, Ramírez, García-Quijano, Ramos).

Social Adaptive Capacity: We will analyze three domains of social system adaptive capacity: network structures, knowledge systems, and visions. We seek to understand the ability of individuals and groups to recognize when change is necessary and to have the social and physical resources to make those changes. An important factor in a person or group’s adaptive capacity is connections with other people, or social networks. Networks refer to the patterns of social relations among actors interlinked through social exchanges, such as information flows, resources, and friendships, among others (Wasserman and Faust 1994). Adaptive capacity tends to increase with greater connections in the social network because actors have access to more information, resources, or help in times of distress. Access to knowledge is also crucial to social adaptive capacity. The knowledge systems that individuals or groups have, for instance, will influence how they understand a problem and how they will respond. Therefore, knowledge systems refer not only to what people know, but sometimes more importantly, is how they know it. The different social practices and techniques that people use to acquire knowledge, such as data collection and indicator monitoring in scientific knowledge and policy analysis, or the information they obtain from other people, organizations, or institutions (i.e., media), will determine what people ultimately believe as truth (Miller et al. 2010). This can often explain why we find contradictions in the lack of risk perceptions of some groups that are clearly vulnerable to a risk. As such, understanding knowledge as a social relation process is a window to understand social adaptive capacity. Synonyms to narratives or framings, visions, as we define them here, refer to the shared mental models that social groups have of the city and their expectations of its future. Diversity in visions promotes social learning

12

and adaptive capacities because it foments creativity, innovation, and transformation (Leach et al. 2012). Without examining the power asymmetries, trade-offs and uncertainties inherent in visions of the city, however, this diversity can result in incommensurability and lock-in rather than innovation. Thus, making these visions explicit becomes useful to assess the dominant ideas fueling mainstream planning and development efforts, and thus future pathways to sustainability (Leach 2008).

Methodological Approaches: Data will be collected mainly through survey questionnaires and ethnographic methods such as semi-structured interviews and focus groups. The methods will be employed to gather data at all three institutional levels (e.g., municipal, neighborhood/community, and individual; Fig. 5), unless otherwise noted. In some cases, we will build upon existing data collection approaches, such as a household survey questionnaire that has been already implemented throughout the

RPRW. We will expand this sampling to improve accuracy. Residents in various communities across the RPRW were interviewed using a 50-item questionnaire that included open-ended/choice questions with variety of formats. This survey, which was paired with vegetation surveys (described below),includes basic socioeconomic indicators (age group, income level, education level, gender, number of persons/household) as well as management of household green areas (e.g., use of pesticides, lawns vs. landscaped). We will complement this questionnaire with new questions regarding networks, knowledge systems, and visions of the city, and adapt it to survey neighborhood and community levels to address management of common green areas and urban protected areas. Focus groups will be used to collect data across all institutional levels since they allow for more in-depth characterization of social adaptive capacities. Therefore, we will conduct focus groups with residents, community leaders, planners, and other key stakeholders in the city. Residents with particular stakes or expertise in important uses of local natural

Figure 5.Illustration of the linkages between institutional levels and management of green areas. This is the focus of the Intensive Analysis component of the proposal. At each institutional level the adaptive capacity of the social system (SS) and the ecological systems (ES), as well as the Feedbacks between these two, will be analyzed with the appropriate measures for each scale as it relates to green infrastructure management and the provision of urban ecosystem services. Arrows (further explained in the text) represent the vertical and horizontal interactions that link management and adaptive capacity across scales and which we hypothesize help build adaptive capacity and novelty for the whole SES. capital and ecosystem services (like, for example, fishermen, gardeners -both ornamental and food gardens- of common or fallow areas) will be identified and interviewed using appropriate ethnographic techniques to learn about their uses and dependence on local resources. We will mainly use semi-structured interviews for the municipal level given that the sample size is smaller and, based on our

13

previous experience, participation rate is higher with these in-person methods for government officials than with the use of questionnaires. Social network analysis involves techniques to understand how the structures of information flow and resources at individual and institutional levels affect key processes for building adaptive capacity such as social learning and multi-scalar collaborative management (Crona and Bodin 2010, Muñoz-Erickson et al. 2010). Actor interactions give rise to emergent social structures or network patterns that can be analyzed mathematically in the forms of graphs of nodes (actors) and links (e.g., information flows) (Wasserman and Faust 1994). We will ask household residents and community members where do they go to obtain information (broadly defined to include knowledge, ideas, data) on green areas in the city and evaluate the extent to which their network span horizontal (connected to other residents and/or communities; Arrows 1 and 2, Fig. 5) and vertical boundaries (higher institutional levels such as city or state) (Arrows 3 to 5, Fig. 5). Knowledge system analyses will build upon existing work conducted at the municipal level to understand the different social practices and ways of reasoning in urban land use and green area planning (Muñoz-Erickson 2012) but which has not been applied before at residential and neighborhood/community levels. Through both survey questionnaires and focus groups, we seek to collect data on the knowledge they have regarding green areas (e.g., plant composition), and the type of information or data people use to make decisions about green area management, what organizations do they rely on for information, and the cognitive ways that they know whether their decisions are having the outcomes they seek in green areas. Analysis of Future City Visions will involve the refinement and testing of future visions that have been analyzed at the municipal level for the neighborhood/community and household levels in order to assess the extent of convergence/divergence of visions among all sectors of the city. Four future visions have been initially identified for San Juan through existing literature and analysis of planning documents in San Juan, including the Economically Sustainable City, the Modern City, the Livable City, and the Ecologically Sustainable City (Muñoz-Erickson 2012). These visions emerged from the existing institutional configuration at the municipal level and differ in the level of optimization placed on various dimensions of sustainability — ecological, economic, and social — and the value placed on strategies and outcomes (e.g., conservation, revitalization, growth, increase ecosystem services, poverty reduction, etc.). We will test and further refine these visions into scenarios through focus groups with residents and community members. We will also examine current practices and preferences for vegetation cover and density for backyards at the neighborhood/community and household level and for common green areas in the watershed. Users will be presented with several backyard and common green area scenarios representing various levels of vegetation cover and structure to identify their preferences (Fig. 6). Scenarios will be constructed with photos and/or videos containing alternate green area configurations, each capable of providing a particular level of pre-selected ecosystem services, be it provision, regulating or cultural.

Ecological Adaptive Capacity: We will examine the ecological adaptive capacity of the green infrastructure of the SES by focusing on four ecological properties that are commonly used to characterize the natural capital and ecological or environmental functions (as well as services) of green spaces (Carreiro et al. 2009, Pouyat et al. 2008, Pickett et al. 2011, Cook et al. 2012). We seek to address what is the current ecological state of different green area configurations (residential yards, common green spaces, and urban protected areas) within the urban ecosystem, how can these serve as indicators of ecological adaptive capacity of the city to habitat transformation and climate change, how do they contribute to ecological connectivity and what are some of the services that they provide? Specifically we will study, (1) plant diversity and composition (by species, origin, uses) and plant community structure with emphasis on woody species, (2) avian and insect diversity with emphasis on groups related to plant-animal interactions (pollination and seed dispersal), (3) plant productivity (based on tree growth, and tree diameter and height data), and (4) abiotic variables associated to air and soil microclimate, soil nutrient content and, soil water availability. These variables play an essential role in supporting a variety of ecosystem processes and may explain existing vegetation patterns. Overall, the above ecological properties are not only related to how elements of the green infrastructure function but are also related to

14

a variety of ecosystem services that contribute to the sustainability and adaptive capacities of the social-ecological system. Green spaces will contribute to the ecological adaptive capacity of the urban green infrastructure by providing habitat for plant and animal species (vertical ecosystem linkages) and also by providing ecosystem services that emerge at different spatial scales some of which will be important at the landscape scale through the connectivity of different configurations (e.g., water infiltration and stream function, carbon sequestration, habitat wildlife permeability – horizontal ecosystem linkages). Our analyses will emphasize ecosystem services that improve the adaptive capacity of the social-ecological urban system in the face of flooding, food insecurity (i.e., food provision), climate change (i.e., thermal regulation), and changes in cultural services (recreation, social inclusion, see SES urban green area feedbacks) as a result of land-use changes all of which have been identified as important vulnerability factors within San Juan (González et al. 2005, Murphy et al. 2011, San Juan ULTRA-Ex 2011). Ultimately, information about the diversity of green area configurations, their functions and ecosystem services, and their degree of connectivity will allow us to examine dynamics within the context of future scenarios of the social-ecological system.

Methodological approaches: Vegetation and fauna analyses – Evaluating the ecological properties of different green area configurations such as yard configurations at RPWS builds upon existing work on the evaluation of biodiversity and density of woody species and large herbs and species under cultivation for food provisioning at the household scale (San Juan ULTRA-Ex 2012). We seek to complement existing household inventory data with data on faunal abundance (insect pollinators, birds) and observations on plant-animal interactions (pollination, seed dispersal) to establish the degree by which different yard configurations may serve as habitat for wildlife and in doing so how they may contribute to the connectivity of the system (from a wildlife perspective – see landscape approach). Pollination is an interaction of interest at the residential scale, as some of the most common food plants at RPWS yards (e.g., mango, avocado, citrus fruits) require insect pollinators for fruit production (McGregor 1976). Within urban areas, factors related to floral abundance, connectivity of green areas (Matteson and Langellotto 2010), and vegetation composition (Tallamy 2007) can influence the abundance and diversity of bee and butterfly populations many of which have pollination functions. Vegetation inventories of common spaces and urban protected areas within RPWS do exist (Lugo et al. 2001, Suárez et al. 2005) but will be complemented with additional ones to increase our sample sizes and to establish areas for current and future monitoring of ecological properties (e.g., plant abundance, plant productivity, species composition). The potential connectivity between residential yards and riparian areas of the watershed will also be explored through at least two mechanisms. First we will examine shared species between these green area configurations, their functional characteristics related to dispersal potential and colonization ability with especial attention to the evaluation of differences in functional traits between native and non-native species. Second we will establish associations between soil traits and riparian function (see below) to evaluate the potential connectivity within the context of biogeochemical and physical processes between residential yards and sub watersheds. Riparian forests serve important roles in maintaining stream water quality and biodiversity (Groffman et al. 2003), thus understanding how they respond to urbanization is crucial. Soil Analyses - Data on a suite of chemical (pH, hydrophobicity, Ca, P, C:N) and physical (temperature, moisture, infiltration, bulk density) soil variables will be collected at the different types of yards to evaluate the association between yard configurations, soil characteristics, and plant productivity. These data will be complemented with measurements of soil infiltration and water capitation potential by vegetation to develop runoff models at the sub watershed scale. Microclimate analyses of green areas– We will develop a network of micrometeorological sensors at three permanent monitoring sites within the RPWS already evaluated for residential vegetation Puerto Nuevo, La Sierra and Cupey (Fig. 2). Each site will have a central meteorological station (to evaluate air temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, precipitation, light environment, soil temperature and humidity and, wind velocity) with data storage capacity for continuous monitoring. This station will be coupled with micro sensors placed across different types of green areas to test for microclimatic

15

differences among green areas. This network will also rely on three reference meteorological stations located across the three major physiographic zones (Fig 1, see Extensive SES Analysis). Our goal is to evaluate the contribution of different green configurations to microclimatic patterns across landscape sections and how these relate to temperature regulation and energy consumption at a much higher level of resolution than usual. Landscape analyses will use a landscape security pattern approach (Yu 2012) to define and evaluate the spatial configurations of different types of green spaces, their contribution to potential connectivity, and emergent ecosystem services that may result from the aggregation of landscape configurations. Landscape security patterns are those strategic portions of the landscape that are important to conserve given their role in the maintenance and safeguarding of certain ecological processes (Yu 1996). Our connectivity analyses will evaluate habitat contiguity and the formation of landscape patterns of different biotic and abiotic variables (structural connectivity) as well as the actual use of the landscape by different organisms (functional connectivity, Saura et al. 2010) to generate hypotheses about how green infrastructure permeability may be facilitated or limited by characteristics of green areas (size and proximity) and urban structures (roads, housing density, buildings).

SES Feedbacks of Urban Green Area Management: Measurements and Analysis We have selected a specific feedback for each institutional level in the city to analyze the interactions between social and ecological systems and how these configurations build social-ecological system adaptive capacity and novelty. Figure 5 provides a visual depiction of the methodological approach for this section. Feedback 1: At the municipal level, we will analyze the dynamics between land use planning and green area management by city and state institutions, the green infrastructure configuration at the watershed and city scale, and flood control. This analysis is the intensive counterpart of the extensive analysis of green area effects on flood management, but with a more in-depth analysis at the decisions, rules, and capacities shaping green area management at the city and state level. Social data on how city and state rules and management policies are shaping green area management at the municipal scale will be collected through analysis of official and planning documents by the city and the state, interviews with government officials, and ecological data derived from the landscape connectivity analyses described above and the land use and the flood risk models developed in the extensive component. Feedback 2: We will analyze dynamics between management of common green areas (e.g., managed or non-managed parks, protected forests, riparian areas, and abandoned lots) by community level institutions, such as neighborhoods, residential associations, multi-community associations, or sectors (e.g., churches) and the capacity of these green areas to provide ecosystem services such as temperature regulation or recreational experience, plants and supplementary foodstuffs (‘wild’ fruits growing in fallow or managed areas). Neighborhoods and communities, and associated common green areas will be selected for a cross-case study comparison along this mosaic of land uses to evaluate adaptive capacities along different SES configurations. We will examine actual and potential uses for green areas for increasing community well-being and quality of life, environmental concern and behavior, as well as, preferences for green area configurations for the neighborhoods/communities selected. We will use ethnographic research methods such as transect walks and resource inventories to assess food and medicinal uses of residential, common, and fallow green areas. There is a body of literature that focuses on the relationship between predictor variables and measures of environmental concern, attitude, and behavior (Eisler et al. 2003, Perrin and Benassi 2009). A review of previous metrics, such as the New Environmental Paradigm, and the Connectedness to Nature Scale, will be examined as part of the process of selecting measures appropriate to the cultural context. Preferences for green area configurations, such as backyard and common green areas (Fig. 6), will be assessed using a Choice Experiments (CE), a stated preference models. When actual markets do not exist, environmental economists often use surveys to obtain consumer’s stated preferences or intended behavior. In this vain, CE are standard tools for eliciting preferences for environmental quality. Choice Experiments in particular is an attribute-based model (Holmes and Adamowicz 2003), which assumes that a respondent is able to make cognitively demanding

16

Figure 6. Illustrations of different green area configurations in the city as an example of scenarios that will be used to evaluate people’s preferences. Individual plates illustrate: (A) a communal park in La Sierra, (B) a communal park in Cupey, (C) a residential front yard in Avenida Central and, (D) a residential front yard in Chiclana. Underlined locations refer to permanent plots for intensive sampling at RPWS (see Fig. 2).

trade-offs. For example, many CE require the respondent to compare several sets of 3 to 4 alternatives, each of which represent trade-offs between 4 to 6 attributes. Community members and residents will also be asked to choose attribute levels to describe the scenario that most closely resembles their current

backyard vegetation. This scenario will then be compared to their preferred hypothetical scenarios to estimate differences in current versus preferred states. All scenario analysis of vegetation cover preferences will be associated with the household’s socio-economic profile, i.e., gender, age, income, and education. We will measure temperature regulation and recreation experience for this institutional level using this scenario approach. Ecological methods and data for the green areas that we select as cases will include the aforementioned measurements for vegetation analysis (e.g., plant composition and diversity), soil, microclimate, and landscape analyses. Feedback 3: This feedback pertains to the dynamics of household and yard configurations across the watersheds and the services they provide, specifically food security and thermal regulation for urban residents. We will build upon the household and vegetation yard survey we have already implemented and will expand to more communities along the watershed. Social data will consist also of measurements of environmental concern and behavior

(e.g., yard practices and management), and measurement of food provision as an ecosystem service using the CE scenario approach in Feedback 2 above. We will also integrate data on household energy consumption and micrometeorological measurements at the household scale. 2.3 Synthetic Workshops: To synthesize the extensive and intensive analysis towards an understanding of how novel configurations affect the ability of the system to adapt to future change, we use scenario-modeling approaches. Scenario studies are increasingly used as a tool for synthetic research activity in long-term research (Thompson et al. 2012). We began this process three years ago through interdisciplinary synthetic workshops to build a heuristic model of the city (see our web page) recognizing that quantifying this model is a long-term endeavor. The model illustrated the outside forces that drive the city, determine potential vulnerability, and set the stage for sustainability and adaptability. We focused on the energy and food requirements of the city. This model continues to guide our data gathering at the large city scale. We will continue these workshops to evaluate the extent to which feedbacks and novel configurations at multiple scales build adaptive capacity for the SES. Because the Intensive SES analysis we propose here offers a snapshot in time, not trends, of social and ecological system structures and processes, we will evaluate adaptive capacity with respect to criteria in the literature, as well as through exploration of emergent responses to changes in the network configurations (through network analysis) or possible future adaptation trends based on different visions of the city. The extensive SES analysis provides a reference model by which we can model the effects of different gray/green area configurations on green infrastructure and ecosystem service provision, considering flood control as a starting point. Several iterations between the qualitative and quantitative models will allow us to identify crucial feedbacks and scales for adaptive capacity in San Juan through green infrastructure innovation.

17

3. EDUCATION AND OUTREACH PLAN Most of our students and collaborations involve Hispanics, which means that our education and

training activities are heavily oriented towards minorities and unrepresented groups in the natural and social sciences. Our program will support many graduate students who will be obtaining Masters and Ph.D. degrees in any of four Universities represented by senior scientists in this proposal. All students participating in this CNH project will be trained as interdisciplinary scientists from the outset as we have agreed that the graduate committees of these students will involve advisors from both the social and natural sciences. Each year, graduate students will participate in a graduate seminar on Urban Social-Ecology, which will be led by one of our PIs and Co-PIs on a rotational basis. We will involve undergraduate students by providing internship opportunities through the University of Puerto Rico and the Forest Service, involving them in social and ecological fieldwork to gain skills in interdisciplinary methods. We will also enhance existing school programs through curriculum development by working with High Schools in the RPRW. We will collaborate with an existing non-profit organization, GAIA (Grupos Ambientales Interdisciplinarios Aliados), which already has agreements with high schools to conduct interdisciplinary workshops and courses. We will work with GAIA to develop an integrated curriculum on the RPRW socio-ecological urban environment using educational sign posts that we have established along the RPRW and that we have linked to scientific information through our website. Our intention is to train these students in interdisciplinary sciences as early as High School.

We will also engage the local community through the dissemination and sharing of the information about the RPRWSES. This work will be done in collaboration with the Forest Service, university student organizations, and Huerto Capetillo, a community-based urban agriculture project of the University of Puerto Rico that serves as a link between university researchers and the Río Piedras urban community. A successful outreach component we will continue is a field trip through various points of social and ecological interest across the watershed. We have taken numerous community leaders, city planners, students, teachers, and scientists to RPRW sites that are linked to our website, where we provide scientific information applicable to each location. We will continue to conduct site tours as has been requested by our collaborators, including planners from the Municipality of San Juan, in addition to enhancing the network of sign posts through further development of our web-based infrastructure so that people can also visit sites on their own with virtual guides using their smart phones. We will also plan studies and develop scenarios for the Extensive SES component with the participation of a network of community leaders, government agencies, and general public selected from the RPRW SES through community forums. We will develop synthesis documents, glossaries, brochures, and self-guided urban field trips for distribution among the communities and government agencies. Specifically, we will continue the publication of our quarterly Bulletin that has been providing synthesis of our research in San Juan and the RPRW to lay audiences (see our website). We will disseminate our results widely through the WEB, press conferences, public meetings, and interactions with planning agencies. Finally, we will evaluate our education and outreach through effectiveness measures of both individual success and project continuity. We will consider the program a success if students seek out research and educational opportunities beyond the set of projects proposed here, such as through professional presentations in meetings in a range of disciplinary outlets, co-authorship of publications, and further their education through graduate school or training in interdisciplinary approaches. We will evaluate the school and outreach programs considering the extent to which our scientific and educational materials are requested and used in teacher’s lesson plans or in community activities, as well as through direct interaction with teachers and community leaders through focus groups, before and after education activities to track their effectiveness. 4. RESEARCH MANAGEMENT PLAN, LEADERSHIP, AND TIMELINE Planning and outreach activities will be coordinated and overseen by the Executive Director (Esther Rojas) and the Project Leader (Muñoz-Erickson) who has directed the development and implementation of this interdisciplinary program over the last three years. The Executive Committee (Lugo, Muñoz-Erickson, Seguinot-Barbosa, Meléndez-Ackerman, and Santiago) will make decisions concerning overall project and research management. With guidance of the Executive Committee, the Project Leader

18

will also oversee and facilitate the overall development of the research so as to ensure the collaboration and integration of the various pieces into the larger objectives of the project through quarterly All-Scientists Meetings and Annual Meetings in which all participants will be present. Annual Meetings will be open to the public to share our progress and results, as well as to conduct education and outreach activities, and solicit critical feedback from our collaborators (see our web page). Lugo and Seguinot-Barbosa will lead the Extensive Analysis component and Santiago and Meléndez-Ackerman will lead the Intensive Analysis component. Each research component will be coordinated and implemented by the interdisciplinary team in charge with team meetings taking place on a monthly basis to allow for progress discussion and adaptive management. Pontius and Hall, pioneers in applying spatial dynamic modeling approaches to social-ecological interactions, will lead the modeling efforts for the Extensive Component. Muñoz-Erickson and Lugo, who together combine experience on social and ecological adaptive capacity and novelty, will direct the overall synthesis through Synthetic Workshops held each year (in conjunction with and not replacing Annual Meetings) that allow more in-depth opportunity for integration across disciplines and across the Extensive and Intensive components to evaluate and model overall social-ecological system adaptive capacity and novelty (Table 2). We will also establish an advisory committee composed of two physical scientists and two social scientists not involved with the project. We expect this group of advisors to review our progress and provide guidance on required adjustments to the research plan. Cuadrado-Landrau, who has extensive experience in building geo-based data infrastructure and web development, will direct our Data Management and Access plan. He will work closely with the researchers to ensure QA/QC of data acquisition and sharing using the LTER data management infrastructure as model. Meléndez-Ackerman,Quintero, and Seguinot –Barbosa will lead the Education and Outreach components. Meléndez-Ackerman has experience co-directing an NSF-CREST program. Quintero is an Education Specialist in the UPR-RP. Seguinot-Barbosa serves as Director of the Environmental Health Program in the UPR Medical Sciences Campus. Table 2.Timeline of activities for 3 years. ACTIVITY Year 1 Year 2 Year 3 Annual Meetings All-Scientists Meetings

Extensive Component Historical land use/cover analysis

Modeling

Intensive Component Social and ecological data collection

Feedback analysis Synthesis Workshops Publications and Report Writing

5. PROJECT SIGNIFICANCE

Intellectual Merit: Our research will provide an improved scientific framework for the understanding, management, and adaptability of urban SES. It will do so by combining multiple approaches to the study of a SES that are commonly studied separately. These approaches — social sciences vulnerability theory, ecological focus that explains the biodiversity of the city and the function of ecosystems, and the cultural and governance dynamics that actively shape and construct the course of the city — together allow us to better understand how urban dynamics and novelty affect system vulnerability and adaptive capacity in face of environmental change. They promise to contribute new understanding to the urban SES literature in general, to the natural and social sciences literature specifically, and to the understanding of urbanizing tropical regions. The proposed research will also advance interdisciplinary research and collaboration. While this type of interdisciplinary collaboration is recognized as a priority in

19

academic communities, actual examples of its implementation are not common and have been slow to develop. The development of this proposal is already an example of a successful interdisciplinary collaboration. In addition to the interdisciplinary team of scientists, it has involved the participation of non-academic stakeholders in the a priori definition of research goals. As such, we have demonstrated that we can effectively move beyond academic boundaries, both academically and socially, and show a catalytic potential for transforming Puerto Rican academic culture and process to address the complex problems we face. Finally, this research will contribute to the emerging field of Sustainability Science by providing conceptual and quantitative models, as well as empirical insights, into sources of novelty to transition toward urban sustainability.

Broader Impacts: This study will affect the way city inhabitants relate to their urban environment, will provide new information to help manage cities more effectively, and develop new approaches to support sustainability efforts in urban areas anywhere in the world. Our nested watershed approach will allow the involvement of city stakeholders at all levels — from the household, community, and government — and facilitate flow of scientific and other knowledge, stewardship ideas, and goals for the planning and management of the city. The combination of extensive and intensive approaches will provide useful information to address both short-term and long-term decision-making. More importantly, because local policy-makers and planning leaders are in the process of developing new land use plans to direct the future course of SJMA and the Island’s development in general, we are in a critical position to inform future alternatives by showing how past and current development patterns have or not been sustainable, and helping envision new pathways that benefit both urban environmental health and quality of life. The conceptual and simulation models that we generate here will also have increasing utility for all the cities of the world as they attempt to understand and adapt to probable climate change and reduced energy and other biophysical inputs. The project will produce a cadre of citizens and minority scientists who are versed in interdisciplinary approaches to evaluating urban environmental change, and will provide them with skills that can be applied in tropical regions or elsewhere in the world. Additional outreach activities are directed at improving public’s access to data and information through a web-based infrastructure that will serve as a data clearinghouse. Given high fragmentation of information and data across governmental institutions worldwide, this infrastructure has the potential for improving the way that science and decision-making interact, as well as empower local communities through increased access and networks of information.

6. RESULTS OF PRIOR NSF SUPPORT

(1). Luquillo Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Program. Grant DEB-060910 for $4,920,000 for the period of 2006 to 2012.Nick Brokaw and Ariel E. Lugo, PIs. This LTER has been active since 1988 and has resulted in about 1,000 publications and 200 graduate student thesis and dissertations. The program focuses on the role of disturbances such as hurricanes, landslides, and land use history in shaping Caribbean wet forests. Lugo’s involvement with LTER ended this year (2012), but his scientific contributions to the LTER include about 60 publications including. studies of the effects of hurricanes and forest management on tropical forests, studies on the effects of past land uses on tropical forests School Yard activities including active research with six rural High Schools and editor of 25volumes (and counting) of Acta Científica (ISSN 1940-1148), the science journal of the Puerto Rico Science Teachers Association, and synthesis. All this research has been summarized in a recently published LTER synthesis volume (Brokaw et al. 2012).

(2). NSF Award Number: 0308414 to Luis E. Santiago, Sub-Award Co PI, for $200,000; 09/15/03 to 02/28/12; Title: Modeling Complex Interactions of Overlapping River and Road Networks in a Changing Landscape. The goal of this research was to develop and test the analytical tools needed to understand and predict the interactions and feedbacks among humans and aquatic species across complex landscapes. Through analyses of a case study in Puerto Rico, the investigators demonstrated that river and road intersections bring about interaction of aquatic species and visitors with mutual feedbacks. Graduate students at the University of Puerto Rico obtained field data on ecological and economic values of rivers

20

in Puerto Rico. Santiago has published three articles based on this research (Santiago and Loomis 2009, Santiago et al. 2008 a, b).

(3). Center for Applied Tropical Ecology and Conservation of the University of Puerto Rico. Agency: NSF-CREST. Elvira Cuevas (PI), E. Meléndez-Ackerman (Co-PI), Jason Rauscher and Eugenio Santiago (Co-PIs). Amount: $5M. Current Sept 2007-August 2012 (NSF-HRD 0734826).This CREST Center has been active since 2002 (two funding cycles) and has resulted in approximately 100 publications and 20 graduate student thesis and dissertations. The Center promotes and support research and the training of Hispanic scientists in applied ecology and conservation. E. Meléndez-Ackerman (co-PI) currently acts as CATEC’s subdirector and is currently advising three Ph.D. dissertations and two Master-level theses. With CREST-CATEC she supported one PhD dissertation, two Master-level, two senior-level theses (already completed), three research symposia and two mini-courses. Her work under this grant generated 15 publications and over 100 presentations all with students as co-authors or main authors.

(4). NSF AWARD Puerto Rico Conservation Foundation San Juan Urban Long Term Research Area (San Juan ULTRA) Exploratory grant. Title: Social-ecological systems change, Vulnerability, and the Future of a Tropical City. Ariel E. Lugo (PI), Tischa A. Muñoz-Erickson (Co-PI), José Seguinot-Barbosa (Co-PI), Luis Santiago (Co-PI), and Elvia Meléndez-Ackerman (Co-PI). Amount: $300,000. Current. Sept 2010 – February 2013 (Award 0948507). The objective of this two-year program was to establish an interdisciplinary research and education infrastructure for analyzing the vulnerability of the city of San Juan, in particular the RPRW, as an urban social-ecological system. This ULTRA-Ex program brought together over 30 researchers and students of natural and social sciences and has resulted in two dissertations and five Master’s these, over 40 presentations, 10 publications, and close to 25 manuscripts in progress for a Special Issue in the journal Ecology and Society. The program has also catalyzed an extensive network of civic and governmental collaborators across the city through participatory workshops, community forums, and various educational activities. San Juan ULTRA promotes interdisciplinary research among investigators and students through synthetic workshops, seminars, field trips, and collaborative research projects throughout a social-ecological sampling network established across the watershed.