Organized Oral Session
Career Track
Hybrid Session
Timon McPhearson
Professor and Director
Urban Systems Lab, The New School, New York, United States
Erik Andersson
Professor
University of Helsinki
Helsinki, Finland
How can we better understand when and how novel ecosystems can help mitigate environmental and social issues? Nature-based solutions (NbS) provide multiple benefits including for flood protection, air and water quality regulation, and urban cooling while contributing to climate change mitigation and sustaining or enhancing biodiversity. Yet despite increasing adoption of NbS, including the 2022 Biden-Harris Administration Executive Order on NbS, key questions remain for how to ensure the ecosystems NbS are based on are themselves resilient and able to provide the core biodiversity and ecological functioning that underpins any nature-based approach to addressing sustainability, equity, and resilience challenges. This session will explore the role of biodiversity and species traits in understanding, managing, and planning ecosystems as the ecological basis of NbS. To do so, we explore research in the urban context since its heavily used and human altered ecosystems provide an important locus for further developing the traits framework.
Traits have found their way to the forefront of many discussions and debates about ecosystem dynamics and more recently urban social-ecological-technological systems (SETS). In an applied and extended sense, traits and how they are expressed are attributes that speak to biophysical limitations, human preferences and selection, ecological functionality, and interactions with site conditions, including the influence of technological infrastructure. The promise is that a traits framework can help further our understanding of ecosystem mediated patterns, dynamics, interactions, and tipping points within and across complex urban SETS. But what will it take to make good on this promise? This session aims to contribute to the current wide-ranging discussion about traits in both theoretical and applied ecology, and parallel work on understanding human connections to nature including with both conceptual contributions and empirical case studies.
One of the main objectives for this session is to provide new insight on the role of traits in and for interdisciplinary urban ecology research. As a boundary concept and disciplinary connector, traits research not only benefits from interdisciplinarity - it provides common ground and conceptual space for expanding the utility, implications and interconnections of ecological research. Given the diverse perspectives, cases, and methodological approaches this session aligns with the ESA Meeting’s theme “For all ecologists,” especially in the ways that ecological research on traits and functional diversity is now being brought into urban ecological research questions and application across diverse geographies and SETS contexts.
Presenting Author: Timon McPhearson – Urban Systems Lab, The New School
Co-author: Erik Andersson – University of Helsinki
Co-author: Filipa Grilo – cE3c-Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Changes & CHANGE-Global Change and Sustainability Institute, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa, 1749-016 Lisbon, Portugal
Presenting Author: Dave Kendal, PhD – University of Tasmania
Presenting Author: Filipa Grilo – cE3c-Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Changes & CHANGE-Global Change and Sustainability Institute, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa, 1749-016 Lisbon, Portugal
Co-author: Timon McPhearson – Urban Systems Lab, The New School
Co-author: Margarida Santos-Reis – cE3c-Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Changes & CHANGE-Global Change and Sustainability Institute, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa, 1749-016 Lisbon, Portugal
Co-author: Cristina Branquinho – cE3c-Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Changes & CHANGE-Global Change and Sustainability Institute, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa, 1749-016 Lisbon, Portugal
Presenting Author: Thilo Wellmann – Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Co-author: Dagmar Haase – Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Co-author: Angela Lausch – UFZ – Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research
Co-author: Erik Andersson – University of Helsinki
Presenting Author: Erik Andersson – University of Helsinki
Presenting Author: Christopher Kennedy – Urban Systems Lab