Using urban agriculture to build
climate-resilient cities
Urban agriculture provides ecosystem services such as nutrient recycling, stormwater infiltration, urban cooling, pollinator habitat, and food production. We are focused on understanding how climate change affects these services, and how urban agriculture can help cities be more resilient in a changing climate.
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Supported by NSF award # 2406481, this project has three main components:
Aim 1: Building on our ongoing long-term experiment in the University of St. Thomas Research Garden, we are measuring the effects of compost quality and input rate, irrigation frequency, and rainfall intensity, on ecosystem services including nutrient recycling, carbon sequestration, evaporative cooling, and crop production.
Aim 2: To extend results across a wider range of environmental conditions and management practices, we are measuring nutrient recycling rates in urban farms across the MSP Metro area.
Aim 3: To understand how incorporating urban agriculture across the landscape will affect ecosystem services at the city scale, we are using a suite of InVEST models to estimate the effects of different implementation scenarios.
Managing water quality in urban lakes
With over 1000 lakes in the MSP Metro region, we have a natural laboratory to understand how management activities and climate change are affecting water quality. We are combining analyses of long-term datasets, new measurements, and ecosystem modeling to understand how lake morphometry, management history, and climate change are altering urban lake water quality. This work is part of the Minneapolis-Saint Paul Long-Term Ecological Research project (MSP LTER), NSF Award # 2045382.
In a related initiative, funded by a new award from the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCCMR 2024-164), we are using a chat-bot to collect data on visitor perception of changes in water quality at urban lakes in the MSP Metro. Visitor perception of water quality is often related to water clarity, but other factors, including visitor activity, changes in vegetation and messaging by management entities, have the potential to alter these perceptions.
Training the next generation of environmental scientists and STEM Educators
Through course-embedded research projects and guided independent research, we train undergraduates (and high school students, and K-12 educators) to be urban ecosystem scientists. Our students gain experience collecting and analyzing data, and presenting results at local meetings or national conferences. A team of our environmental science students won first place in the 2023 Student Environment Challenge competition, creating a cost-effective plan to retrofit a small town's wastewater treatment system to comply with new nitrogen effluent standards.
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We are part of a new initiative, through the Robert Noyce Scholarship Program (Award 2344510), offering generous scholarships and research experience to STEM majors committed to earning high school teaching certification and teaching in a high-needs school district.
