Landscape & resource management
Urban productive ecosystems are important components of the green infrastructure of cities. We must understand how to manage them from both a landscape-scale perspective, and from a local habitat perspective.
Current projects ask how we can better understand and manage socio-ecological connectivity across landscapes. Work in spatial landscape ecology assesses landscape-scale structural and functional connectivity of urban ecosystems in relation to ecosystem services. We use gardens as model social-ecological systems to show how these systems promote landscape-scale ecosystem service flows through socio-ecological connectivity. We show that the nature of these flows (e.g., magnitude, direction) change with landscape biophysical and social heterogeneity - and this is very city-specific. This may have important implications for how people benefit from ecosystem services. The methods and findings we use aim to be harnessed by local stakeholders to make informed land use planning decisions to promote urban ecosystem services and build urban resilience at a landscape scale.