Symposium

Title: Human Dominated Landscapes

Organizer: Adina Merenlender, University of California; Jodi Hilty, Wildlife Conservation Society

Session Goals:
Dynamic panelists will present and engage the participants in an effort to explore the drivers and environmental consequences of rapidly changing land-use across multiple types of human dominated landscapes.  Together we will discuss policies that will improve sustainable development and resource conservation.

1. Quantify the extent and rapid expansion of developed landscapes and the consequences to biodiversity and the environment.
2. Discuss the drivers and consequences of land-use change.
3. Present successful build-out models that coupled with biodiversity data provide pragmatic decision-support tools in use by local planners to evaluate environmental and social trade-offs of land-use policy.
4. Promote a new conservation strategy focused on coupling land-use and conservation planning.

Summary:
Evidence of a human footprint now exceeds eighty percent of the land area on Earth, excluding Antarctica.  Within these regions, human activities are not static and land-use is changing rapidly worldwide.  Highly productive lands important for biodiversity are also where much of the human activity and development are concentrated making it essential to improve our understanding and management of human dominated landscapes.  Over the last 50 years, for example, we have seen a net decline in family farming and a consolidation of farms being managed in a more intense industrial and monoculture farming system approach. Similarly, large tracts of private managed forests and ranches are increasingly turning over to exurbia, the number one source of land-use change in the United States.  Urban areas are in some cases transforming into greener communities with parks and walkways and in other cases are rapidly expanding and converting natural areas. This symposium will focus on the drivers and environmental consequences of these managed ecosystems across a gradient of land-use intensity including urban, exurban, agricultural land and the wildland interface.  

Landscapes across the world are a mix of urban and rural development, agriculture, and remnant patches of natural habitat. With uninhabitable land and protected areas providing the only barriers to further development, the human footprint continues to expand resulting in habitat fragmentation and isolation of habitat patches with different levels of biodiversity retained with the managed landscapes. This can reduce the opportunities for organisms to access remaining fragments of habitat, and a myriad of other ecological, social, and economic challenges often arise as a result of increasing human activity across landscapes.  Yet land-use change has multiple drivers and complex outcomes such that there is no simple technical fix.  Rather we need a host of policy, education and incentive approaches grounded in good science to create refugia, enhance connectivity, and even more importantly, guide human activities and development in an approach that minimizes negative consequences.

Because of the interactions between human development and ecosystems, we need to understand rates and patterns of human development and the relationships between land use and environmental impacts.  We need to research causal relationships between land use and biodiversity over time, so we can avoid crossing ecological thresholds beyond which ecosystem components and function may no longer be reparable causing ecological, social and economic havoc. We will demonstrate how understanding the process and pattern of land-use change can be used to forecast future change, and determine the risk of these changes to the environment to plan for a sustainable future.

This session will begin by defining urban ecology and the challenges and opportunities that exist in the urban environment.  We then will examine a less-studied phenomenon, of exurban development and its consequences.  Although exurbia science is still in many ways in its infancy in that we do not understand all the causal impact chains, the science of land-use planning is more advanced and the interconnection between the two fields can inform a path forward.  We then will move to discussions with participants about the agricultural landscapes, the changes in practices we are seeing, and the needs as well as opportunities in the future.  Throughout these discussions, we will ask what we know and how do the science findings direct policy opportunities to ensure that the ecological and socio-economic fabric remain strong in these human-dominated environments. We will also look for common links between these types of managed landscapes and opportunities to develop policies that will lead to more sustainable growth and environmental protection.

Speakers:
Urban ecology:  Marina Alberti, Ph.D., University of Washington (invited)
Exurban development:  Adina Merenlender, Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley and  David Theobald, Ph.D.
Agricultural Ecosystems:  Devra Jarvis, Ph.D.,  Biodiversity International (PowerPoint)
Wildland Interface:  Jodi Hilty Ph.D., Wildlife Conservation Society
Land economics:  Nancy Bockstael , Ph.D., University of Maryland (PowerPoint)
Alex Beehler, Assistant Deputy Under Secretary for Environment, Safety and Occupational Health, Department of Defense

Thank you to Wildlife Conservation Society for supporting this symposium.