French Ties

In my role as a co-principle investigator in the Baltimore Ecosystem Study I was thrilled to participate last week in the 2d France-US Urban Ecology workshop in Baltimore.

The BES is one of two National Science Foundation-sponsored long term studies of cities as ecosystems. At the BES annual meeting last week, BES scientists and research teams continued to refine our understanding of how cities work in powerful ways. In recent years, for example, BES studies have shown that riparian zones (vegetation along the banks of rivers and streams) do not operate in cities the way they operate in rural and suburban areas. In urban areas, the change in the rate of flow is so great that the riparian zones simply cannot serve to filter stormwater and pollution they way they do in rural areas. As such, the true riparian zone in cities is the urban tree canopy as a whole, which filters stormwater before it even gets into the storm sewers and then into the streams.

Stormwater runoff in the context of a changing climate was one of the common themes that emerged in the conversations between the French-US teams that followed the BES annual meeting. Two other fascinating topics that the teams will be working on together: The role for scientists in desiging and implementing the Urban Environmental Accords, UN-sponsored action plans for buidings sustainable cities, signed by over 100 cities since 2005, and also the concept of territoire, or the concept or sense of space created by public process and participation. On this last project, a team of natural and social scientists will be exploring the use of territoire as a method for integrating the social and natural sciences in urban planning. Heady stuff, and yet both of these projects seek to bring French and US research teams into the discussion of how we manage cities in the 21st Century.