EARTHSTEWARDSHIP

INITIATIVE

PORTLAND, OR2017

Summary: The third Earth Stewardship Initiative (ESI) Demonstration Project is organizing as a “learning from the city” program. Working in conjunction with the City of Portland Bureau of Environmental Services (BES), we will evaluate Portland’s green infrastructure (GI) design and implementation practices and propose designed experiments to inform their process. We will use a transdisciplinary education, and training program engaging ecologists with the City of Portland to learn about green infrastructure design, engineering and maintenance and to propose research.

Overview: With population growth, rapid urbanization, and climate change threatening human and natural systems, it is imperative to better understand and shape cities. Practitioners shaping cities--including architects, landscape architects and urban designers--are increasingly building ecological landscapes. However, practitioners work with limited ecological data or precedents, since urban landscapes have rarely been planned to promote ecosystem functions and ecologists remain peripheral to the design process.

To foster collaboration between ecologists and city practitioners for the integration of ecological research in designing and managing cities, we have developed the ESI. The program serves as a dynamic framework for transdisciplinary collaboration using a training forum for ecologists and designers to work on real-world projects. ESI solicits graduate student fellows from around the country to collaborate with city officials, practitioners, and ESA senior scientists on large-scale land planning projects.

Portland is a national leader in implementing green infrastructure (GI), and has established a city-wide green network drawing on considerable experience with GI design, implementation, monitoring, maintenance, and stewardship. Through the ESI participants will generate proposed designed experiments and adaptive management and organize this information and into a white paper.

Themes: Below we describe three themes for conference working groupsResilient landscapes through Spatial Planning of Green Infrastructure: Develop an experiment for assessing the performance and value of Portland’s existing green infrastructure and monitoring practices, translating across the project site-scale to the system scale. City questions: What specific local areas need more attention in improving watershed health, and what specific indica-tor(s) require the most attention? Should the frequency with which projects are sampled and measured be improved to uncover more accurate trends in health across the landscape? It is hard to know the effects of management/intervention until months after it is implemented.

Earth Stewardship Initiative Demonstration Project at the Ecological Society of America Annual Meeting

Overview Document

August 6th –11th, 2017 Portland Oregon

• Pre-conference planning phone call with Portland BES and Fellows (August tbd)• FT 10 - Ecology for Cities: Exploring Green Infrastructure in Portland, Convention

Center, M.L. King Jr. Lobby. August 8, 2017, 8:00a-1:00p• ESI Project Reception, Doug Fir Lounge. August 9, 2017, 6:30p-8:00p• WK 57 - Green Infrastructure Implementation and Monitoring in Portland Focusing

on Experimental Research and Ecological Function, Convention Center, B110-111. August 10, 2017 11:30a-1:15p

• Coordinate white paper/case study development and conference call. August 2017.• White paper draft deadline and conference call. October 30, 2017.• Submission of final paper. December 15, 2017.

Biodiversity, Aesthetics and Public Value: Develop designed experiments that evaluate the biological (e.g. biodiversity), social (e.g. aesthetic value), and finan-cial benefits (e.g. public money saved) of GI. City questions: Are Portland’s monitoring efforts (e.g. WSHI Index and watershed report cards) the best method for sharing these results? What experiments or data would be most compelling, especially to the public? How should city officials and the public act upon water-shed report cards and how can these values be communicated through design, outreach and education to the community?

Green infrastructure Climate Change Adaptation and Education: Develop a designed experiment research project focusing on future conditions with climate change and the role of GI. City questions: How well do the indicators, rating curves and grading system used to evaluate the health of Portland’s watersheds function for communicating? Public encouragement: Should actions be graded separately from health to promote an iterative and incremental adaptive man-agement for improvements over time? The City strives to solve problems at their source, not just their symptoms; which actions will avoid future problems?

Activities: