Tag Archives: ecosystem services

2021: Year in Review

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As per usual, I’ll list out and link to the stories I chose as the most frightening, most hopeful, and most interesting each month in 2021. Then I’ll see if I have anything smart to say about how it all fits together.

Survey of the Year’s Stories and Themes

Most frightening and/or depressing stories:

  • JANUARY: A China-Taiwan military conflict is a potential start-of-World-War-III scenario. This could happen today, or this year, or never. Let’s hope for the latter. This is a near-term existential risk, but I have to break my own “rule of one” and give honorable mention to two longer-term scary things: crashing sperm counts and the climate change/fascism/genocide nexus.
  • FEBRUARY: For people who just don’t care that much about plants and animals, the elevator pitch on climate change is it is coming for our houses and it is coming for our food and water.
  • MARCH: In the U.S. upper Midwest (I don’t know if this region is better or worse than the country as a whole, or why they picked it), electric blackouts average 92 minutes per year, versus 4 minutes per year in Japan.
  • APRIL: One of the National Intelligence Council’s scenarios for 2040 involves “far-reaching changes designed to address climate change, resource depletion, and poverty following a global food catastrophe caused by climate events and environmental degradation”.
  • MAY: The Colorado River basin is drying out.
  • JUNE: For every 2 people who died of Covid-19 in the U.S. about 1 additional person died of indirect effects, such as our lack of a functioning health care system and safe streets compared to virtually all our peer countries.
  • JULY: The western-U.S. megadrought looks like it is settling in for the long haul.
  • AUGUST: The U.S. is not prepared for megadisasters. Pandemics, just to cite one example. War and climate change tipping points, just to cite two others. Solutions or at least risk mitigation measures exist, such as getting a health care system, joining the worldwide effort to deal with carbon emissions, and as for war, how about just try to avoid it?
  • SEPTEMBER: The most frightening climate change tipping points may not be the ones we hear the most about in the media (at least in my case, I was most aware of melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, collapse of ocean circulation patterns). The most damaging may be melting permafrost on land and methane hydrates underwater, both of which contain enormous amounts of methane which could set off a catastrophic and unstoppable feedback loop if released in large quantities.
  • OCTOBER: The technology (sometimes called “gain of function“) to make something like Covid-19 or something much worse in a laboratory clearly exists right now, and barriers to doing that are much lower than other types of weapons. Also, because I just couldn’t choose this month, asteroids can sneak up on us.
  • NOVEMBER: Freakonomics podcast explained that there is a strong connection between cars and violence in the United States. Because cars kill and injure people on a massive scale, they led to an expansion of police power. Police and ordinary citizens started coming into contact much more often than they had. We have no national ID system so the poor and disadvantaged often have no ID when they get stopped. Everyone has guns and everyone is jumpy. Known solutions (safe street design) and near term solutions (computer-controlled vehicles?) exist, but are we going to pursue them as a society? I guess I am feeling frightened and/or depressed today, hence my choice of category here.
  • DECEMBER: Mass migration driven by climate change-triggered disasters could be the emerging big issue for 2022 and beyond. Geopolitical instability is a likely result, not to mention enormous human suffering.

Most hopeful stories:

  • JANUARY: Computer modeling, done well, can inform decisions better than data analysis alone. An obvious statement? Well, maybe to some but it is disputed every day by others, especially staff at some government regulatory agencies I interact with.
  • FEBRUARY: It is possible that mRNA technology could cure or prevent herpes, malaria, flu, sickle cell anemia, cancer, HIV, Zika and Ebola (and obviously coronavirus). With flu and coronavirus, it may become possible to design a single shot that would protect against thousands of strains. It could also be used for nefarious purposes, and to protect against that are ideas about what a biological threat surveillance system could look like.
  • MARCH: I officially released my infrastructure plan for America, a few weeks before Joe Biden released his. None of the Sunday morning talk shows has called me to discuss so far. Unfortunately, I do not have the resources of the U.S. Treasury or Federal Reserve available to me. Of course, neither does he unless he can convince Congress to go along with at least some portion of his plans. Looking at his proposal, I think he is proposing to direct the fire hoses at the right fires (children, education, research, water, the electric grid and electric vehicles, maintenance of highways and roads, housing, and ecosystems. There is still no real planning involved, because planning needs to be done in between crises and it never is. Still, I think it is a good proposal that will pay off economically while helping real people, and I hope a substantial portion of it survives.
  • APRIL: Giant tortoises reach a state of “negligible senescense” where they simply don’t age for a long time. Humans are distant relatives of giant tortoises, so maybe we can aspire to this some day. They are not invulnerable to injury and disease.
  • MAY: An effective vaccine for malaria may be on the way. Malaria kills more children in Africa every year than Covid-19 killed people of all ages in Africa during the worst year of the pandemic. And malaria has been killing children every year for centuries and will continue long after Covid-19 is gone unless something is done.
  • JUNE: Masks, ventilation, and filtration work pretty well to prevent Covid transmission in schools. We should learn something from this and start designing much healthier schools and offices going forward. Design good ventilation and filtration into all buildings with lots of people in them. We will be healthier all the time and readier for the next pandemic. Then masks can be slapped on as a last layer of defense. Enough with the plexiglass, it’s just stupid and it’s time for it to go.
  • JULY: A new Lyme disease vaccine may be on the horizon (if you’re a human – if you are a dog, talk to your owner about getting the approved vaccine today.) I admit, I had to stretch a bit to find a positive story this month.
  • AUGUST: The Nordic welfare model works by providing excellent benefits to the middle class, which builds the public and political support to collect sufficient taxes to provide the benefits, and so on in a virtuous cycle. This is not a hopeful story for the U.S., where wealthy and powerful interests easily break the cycle with anti-tax propaganda, which ensure benefits are underfunded, inadequate, available only to the poor, and resented by middle class tax payers.
  • SEPTEMBER: Space-based solar power could finally be in our realistic near-term future. I would probably put this in the “interesting” rather than “hopeful” category most months, but I really struggled to come up with a hopeful story this month. I am at least a tiny bit hopeful this could be the “killer app” that gets humanity over the “dirty and scarce” energy hump once and for all, and lets us move on to the next layer of problems.
  • OCTOBER: The situation with fish and overfishing is actually much better than I thought.
  • NOVEMBER: Urban areas may have some ecological value after all.
  • DECEMBER: Covid-19 seems to be “disappearing” in Japan, or at least was before the Omicron wave. Maybe lessons could be learned. It seems possible that East Asian people have at least some genetic defenses over what other ethnic groups have, but I would put my money on tight border screening and an excellent public health care system. Okay, now I’m starting to feel a bit depressed again, sitting here in the U.S. where we can’t have these nice things thanks to our ignorant politicians.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

  • JANUARY: There have been fabulous advances in note taking techniques! Well, not really, but there are some time honored techniques out there that could be new and beneficial for many people to learn, and I think this is an underappreciated productivity and innovation skill that could benefit people in a lot of areas, not just students.
  • FEBRUARY: At least one serious scientist is arguing that Oumuamua was only the tip of an iceberg of extraterrestrial objects we should expect to see going forward.
  • MARCH: One study says 1-2 days per week is a sweet spot for working from home in terms of a positive economic contribution at the national scale. I think it is about right psychologically for many people too. However, this was a very theoretical simulation, and other studies attempting to measure this at the individual or firm scale have come up with a 20-50% loss in productivity. I think the jury is still out on this one, but I know from personal experience that people need to interact and communicate regularly for teams to be productive, and some people require more supervision than others, and I don’t think technology is a perfect substitute for doing these things in person so far.
  • APRIL: Hydrogen fuel cells may finally be arriving. Not so much in the U.S., where we can’t have nice things.
  • MAY: I learned about Lawrence Kohlberg, who had some ideas on the use of moral dilemmas in education.
  • JUNE: The big U.S. government UFO report was a dud. But what’s interesting about it is that we have all quietly seemed to have accepted that something is going on, even if we have no idea what it is, and this is new.
  • JULY: “Cliodynamics” is an attempt at a structured, evidence-based way to test hypotheses about history.
  • AUGUST: Ectogenesis is an idea for colonizing other planets that involves freezing embryos and putting them on a spaceship along with robots to thaw them out and raise them. Fungi could also be very useful in space, providing food, medicine, and building materials.
  • SEPTEMBER: Philip K. Dick was not only a prolific science fiction author, he also developed a comprehensive theory of religion which could possibly even be the right one. Also, possibly related but not really, if there are aliens out there they might live in creepy colonies or super-organisms like ants or termites.
  • OCTOBER: I thought about how to accelerate scientific progress: “[F]irst a round of automated numerical/computational experiments on a huge number of permutations, then a round of automated physical experiments on a subset of promising alternatives, then rounds of human-guided and/or human-performed experiments on additional subsets until you hone in on a new solution… [C]ommit resources and brains to making additional passes through the dustbin of rejected results periodically…” and finally “educating the next generation of brains now so they are online 20 years from now when you need them to take over.” Easy, right?
  • NOVEMBER: Peter Turchin continues his project to empirically test history. In this article, he says the evidence points to innovation in military technologies being driven by “world population size, connectivity between geographical areas of innovation and adoption, and critical enabling technological advances, such as iron metallurgy and horse riding“. What does not drive innovation? “state-level factors such as polity population, territorial size, or governance sophistication“. As far as the technologies coming down the pike in 2022, one “horizon scan” has identified “satellite megaconstellations, deep sea mining, floating photovoltaics, long-distance wireless energy, and ammonia as a fuel source”.
  • DECEMBER: Time reminded us of all the industries Elon Musk has disrupted so far: human-controlled, internal-combustion-fueled automobiles; spaceflight; infrastructure construction (I don’t know that he has really achieved any paradigm shifts here, but not for lack of trying), “artificial intelligence, neurotechnology, payment systems and cryptocurrency.” I’m not sure I follow a couple of these, but I think they missed satellites.

Continuing Signs of U.S. Relative Decline

Signs of U.S. decline relative to our peer group of advanced nations are all around us. I don’t know that we are in absolute decline, but I think we are now below average among the most advanced countries in the world. We are not investing in the infrastructure needed in a modern economy just to reduce friction and let the economy function. The annual length of electric blackouts in the U.S. (hours) compared to leading peers like Japan (minutes) is just one telling indicator. In March, I looked at the Build Back Better proposal and concluded that it was more like directing a firehose of money at a range of problems than an actual plan, but I hoped at least some of it would happen. My rather low but not zero expectations were met, as some limited funding was provided for “hard infrastructure” and energy/emissions projects, but little or nothing (so far, as I write this) to address our systemic failures in health care, child care, or education. The crazy violence on our streets, both gun-related and motor vehicle-related, is another indicator. Known solutions to all these problems exist and are being implemented to various extents by peer countries. Meanwhile our toxic politics and general ignorance continue to hold us back. Biden really gave it his best shot – but if this is our “once in a generation” attempt, we are headed down a road where we will no longer qualify as a member of the pack of elite countries, let alone its leader.

The Climate Change, Drought, Food, Natural Disaster, Migration and Geopolitical Instability Nexus

2021 was a pretty bad year for storms, fires, floods, and droughts. All these things affect our homes, our infrastructure, our food supply, and our water supply. Drought in particular can trigger mass migration. Mass migration can be a disaster for human rights and human dignity in and of itself, and managing it effectively is difficult even for well-intentioned governments. But an insidious related problem is that migration pressure can tend to fuel right wing populist and racist political movements. We see this happening all over the world, and the situation seems likely to get worse.

Tipping Points and other Really Bad Things We Aren’t Prepared For

We can be thankful that nothing really big and new and bad happened in 2021. My apologies to anyone reading this who lost someone or had a tough year. Of course, plenty of bad things happened to good people, and plenty of bad things happened on a regional or local scale. But while Covid-19 ground on and plenty of local and regional-scale natural disasters and conflicts occurred, there were no new planetary-scale disasters. This is good because humanity has had enough trouble dealing with Covid-19, and another major disaster hitting at the same time could be the one that brings our civilization to the breaking point.

So we have a trend of food insecurity and migration pressure creeping up on us over time, and we are not handling it well even given time to do so. Maybe we can hope that some adjustments will be made there to get the world on a sustainable track. Even if we do that, there are some really bad things that could happen suddenly. Catastrophic war is an obvious one. A truly catastrophic pandemic is another (as opposed to the moderately disastrous pandemic we have just gone through.) Creeping loss of human fertility is one that is not getting much attention, but this seems like an existential risk if it were to cross some threshold where suddenly the global population starts to drop quickly and we can’t do anything about it. Asteroids were one thing I really thought we didn’t have to worry much about on the time scale of any human alive today, but I may have been wrong about that. And finally, the most horrifying risk to me in the list above is the idea of an accelerating, runaway feedback loop of methane release from thawing permafrost or underwater methane hydrates.

We are almost certainly not managing these risks. These risks are probably not 100% avoidable, but since they are existential we should be actively working to minimize the chance of them happening, preparing to respond in real time, and preparing to recover afterward if they happen. Covid-19 was a dress rehearsal for dealing with a big global risk event, and humanity mostly failed to prepare or respond effectively. We are lucky it was one we should be able to recover from as long as we get some time before the next body blow. We not only need to prepare for much, much worse events that could happen, we need to match our preparations to the likelihood of more than one of them happening at the same time or in quick succession.

Technological Progress

Enough doom and gloom. We humans are here, alive, and many of us are physically comfortable and have much more leisure time than our ancestors. Our social, economic, and technological systems seem to be muddling through from day to day for the time being. We have intelligence, science, creativity, and problem solving abilities available to us if we choose to make use of them. Let’s see what’s going on with technology.

Biotechnology: The new mRNA technology accelerated by the pandemic opens up potential cures for a range of diseases. We need an effective biological surveillance system akin to nuclear weapons inspections (which we also need) to make sure it is not misused (oops, doom and gloom trying to creep in, but there are some ideas for this.) We have vaccines on the horizon for diseases that have been plaguing us for decades or longer, like malaria and Lyme disease. Malaria kills more children worldwide, year in and year out, than coronavirus has killed per year at its peak.

Promising energy technologies: Space based solar power may finally be getting closer to reality. Ditto for hydrogen fuel cells in vehicles, although not particularly in the U.S. (I’m not sure this is preferable to electric vehicles for everyday transportation, but it seems like a cleaner alternative to diesel and jet fuel when large amounts of power are needed in trucking, construction, and aviation, for example.)

Other technologies: We are actually using technology to catch fish in more sustainable ways, and to grow fish on farms in more sustainable ways. We are getting better at looking for extraterrestrial objects, and the more we look, the more of them we expect to see (this one is exciting and scary at the same time). We are putting satellites in orbit on an unprecedented scale. We have computers, robots, artificial intelligence of a sort, and approaches to use them to potentially accelerate scientific advancements going forward.

The State of Earth’s Ecosystems

The state and trends of the Earth’s ecosystems continue to be concerning. Climate change continues to churn through the public consciousness and our political systems, and painful as the process is I think our civilization is slowly coming to a consensus that something is happening and something needs to be done about it (decades after we should have been able to do this based on the evidence and knowledge available.) When it comes to our ecosystems, however, I think we are in the very early stages of this process. This is something I would like to focus on in this blog in the coming year. My work and family life are busy, and I have decided to take on an additional challenge of becoming a student again for the first time in the 21st century, but somehow I will persevere. If you are reading this shortly after I write it in January 2022, here’s to good luck and prosperity in the new year!

How much ecological function can urban green space provide?

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This is an important research question, I think, as the world becomes even more urbanized. Here’s a new study:

Vegetation Type and Age Matter: How to Optimize the Provision of Ecosystem Services in Urban Parks

As cities grow, urban greenspace assumes a more central role in the provision of ecosystem services (ESS). Many ecosystem services depend on the interactions of soil-plant systems, with the quantity and quality of services affected by plant type and age. The question, however, remains whether urban greenspace can be included in the same ecological framework as non-urban greenspace. Our previous studies have contributed towards filling this knowledge gap by investigating the effects of plant functional type (evergreen trees, deciduous trees and lawn) and plant age on soil characteristics and functionality in urban greenspace, offering also a comparison with non-urban greenspace. A total of 41 urban parks and five non-urban forest sites within and adjacent to the cities of Helsinki and Lahti (Finland) were included in this project. Path analyses presented in this contribution, combined with a synthesis of previous findings, offer strong evidence that urban greenspace functions similarly to non-urban greenspace. In particular, plant functional types lead to soil environmental modifications similar to those in non-urban ecosystems. Therefore, vegetation choice upon park construction/implementation can improve the quality and quantity of ESS provided by urban greenspace. However, although vegetation modifies urban greenspace soils with time in a fashion similar to non-urban greenspace, the vegetation type effect is greater in non-urban greenspaces. To conclude, our synthesis of previous studies provides science-based guidance for urban planners who aim to optimize ESS in urban greenspaces.

Urban Forestry and Urban Greening

Ecosystem services and ecological function are not exactly the same thing. Ecological function just is. Ecosystem services are what ecological functions do for people, and fit into the mainstream economic analysis framework. Part of the issue in studying this, I think, is scale. If you look only at one site, block, or park in a city, you might conclude that ecosystems services are negligible or un-measurable. If you look at the entire network and how it is connected, you might conclude that the effects are measurable and that there are policy and design choices that could make them better.

Biodiversity is something else again. More biodiversity is not always better, if it consists of more species of rats or coronaviruses, for example. But biodiversity may be a reasonable proxy measure for how the structure of a designed urban ecosystem translates to ecological function. This is useful if ecological function itself turns out to be difficult to measure. And I think the most useful measures might be biodiversity of animals such as insects (bees, butterflies) and birds. Because the plants in urban areas are mostly the ones that people put there. Biodiversity of plants can be improved through design choices, which is a good thing but in measuring that you are largely measuring inputs to the system rather than the resulting state of the system. Measure the animals, and you are measuring the resulting state of the system.

Measuring things that flit and flutter around might seem daunting. Well, you could try to do it with cameras and image processing of some sort. Or if you are interested in insects you can focus on larva, aka caterpillars. Tracking down bee and wasp nests seems a bit more risky, and you might also have a public relations problem trying to explain why more bee and wasp nests would be a good thing. But caterpillars don’t move fast, so trained people should be able to cordon off an area and find and identify them periodically. Let’s say you did this once a week for a year at several defined points in an urban area, especially if land use changes are occurring (or maybe some places they are occurring and some places they are not occurring.) Doing the same thing in nearby forests and/or farm fields might also add worthwhile data. Now you can do some data analysis and modeling, and maybe figure out design or policy choices that would help the little critters while also benefiting or at least not pissing off people or costing them any money. If you want to fund my half-baked research proposal, let me know.

robot pollinators

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Somehow, startup companies have heard about my idea for robotic bees. (This is a Wall Street Journal article, which I don’t subscribe to, but I can get the idea from the first couple paragraphs. Sorry guys, I can’t afford to subscribe to anything, and if I have to pick one thing it will probably be to support my local paper. Except, if I lived in New York, it would not be the New York Times because weapons of mass destruction.) More likely, it’s a fairly obvious idea. And probably a good idea, if the pollinators really are disappearing worldwide. Then again, it’s a partial technological solution to replace a lost ecosystem service. Trucking around hives of domesticated honeybees to replace or supplement natural pollinators in farm fields is already a technological solution, if you think about it. Important questions: Do they sting? (I hope the answer is an obvious no.) Are we going to release clouds of robot pollinators into natural ecosystems? Probably not, this seems focused on agriculture. Are they going to be solar powered? It seems like it would be safer to have them return to a charging station, or else drop dead if their batteries run out.

This also brings up all the usual questions about valuing ecosystem services. Pollination is absolutely essential to life on earth, so pollinators are incredibly valuable in an economic sense. If we replace them with technology, does their value drop? In an economic sense, yes. In a moral sense, I would say no, at least to me.

what is green infrastructure

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Here’s a paper that goes into the many definitions of green infrastructure across different disciplines, along with related concepts. I’ve certainly seen narrow definitions used in my own discipline of water resources engineering. Defining clearly what you mean by a term and sticking to that definition is actually a good thing, because it takes the power out of the words in the definition itself, and you are now defining the actual structure and/or function of something, and you can now have a conversation with someone else once they understand the definition you are using. Using words without a clear definition, or not being aware of alternate definitions or broader perspectives that are out there, is a problem, and unfortunately not an uncommon one.

Pollinator Park

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Pollinator Park is a sort of virtual botanical park tour created by the EU. The idea is to show us “what a world without pollinators would be like”. It sounds and looks cool, but didn’t load correctly in my web browser. It is also supposed to work in Oculus Rift, which I am sure is cool. There are some nice pictures in this Inhabitat article.

I have certainly heard that pollinators, and insects more generally, are disappearing, not just on a species diversity basis but on an absolute biomass basis. It makes complete sense that the loss and fragmentation of natural habitats and native vegetation would lead to a loss of insects. Pollution, agricultural chemicals, and climate change (heat/drought/fires/floods/storms) can’t be helping. I have seen at least one dissenting paper on insect loss however and would like to understand the evidence for it better. But taken at face value, it is very concerning. Pollination is undoubtedly a critical ecosystem service that we can’t do without, and this is fairly easy to understand. Unless we can go to some kind of high-tech indoor agriculture, which currently would not be a feasible way to feed 7+ billion people.

I’d also like to understand to what extent it is important to preserve some natural habitat and native vegetation (or other pollinator-friendly vegetation?) in the midst of farmland to maintain yields. What size and what shape should these habitat islands or corridors be, and do they need to be paired with specific crops? More esoterically, if you change the type of crop being grown but leave the insects and vegetation in place, does the ecosystem service value diminish? (economically, yes, but logically and morally, this makes no sense to me and I think it helps illustrate the limits of the economic approach.) Could these designed/managed habitats act as useful buffer/transition areas to more natural preserved areas? Or would they do the opposite, importing non-native plants and animals that would have an adverse impact? Can urban and suburban parks and gardens play a meaningful role? Or is it hopeless and only trying to preserve vast swathes of untouched wilderness would do? (maybe add a placeholder for this on our next planet.) Should we be releasing vast swarms of genetically modified or self-replicating robot insects? (I’m going to go with no!)

What’s new with emergy?

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Okay, I basically understand what emergy (embodied energy) is – the amount of energy incorporated (as opposed to lost to heat) in something useful, like an organism or a whole ecosystem. I am partial to the concept just from secondhand exposure to Howard T. Odum at the University of Florida. I never studied with him, but I knew some of his students and absorbed a little bit of his ideas through osmosis, and then I went back and did some reading later when I realized what I had missed. This paper is co-authored by Mark T. Brown, Odum’s long time collaborator who is still at UF pumping out studies on the subject.

The paper is interesting just for its literature review of other studies of ecosystem services and ecosystem function. The methods section has a nice run down of available spatial layers on energy, biomass, and ecosystems. The conclusion is that ecosystem functions are valuable, we have destroyed a lot of them, we are continuing to destroy them, and we may not be able to survive without them.

October 2020 in Review

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In current events, this was just the month that the fall resurgence of Covid-19 exploded in the U.S. and around the world. Just a month when a new, controversial Supreme Court justice was sworn in. Just the last month leading up to the Biden-Trump election, amid a swirl of questions about a peaceful and orderly transfer of power if the voting goes the way the polls clearly say it is going to. Just a month when my home city erupted in “unrest” for the second time this year and the National Guard rolled in. (Incidentally, Joe Biden is also here as I write this on November 1, and I wonder if the National Guard rolling in is entirely a coincidence.)

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Global ecological collapse is most likely upon us, and our attention is elsewhere. The good news is we still have enough to eat (on average – of course we don’t get it to everyone who needs it), for now.

Most hopeful story: We have almost survived another four years without a nuclear war. Awful as Covid-19 has been, we will get through it despite the current administration’s complete failure to plan, prevent, prepare, respond or manage it. There would be no such muddling through a nuclear war.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: There are at least some bright ideas on how to innovate faster and better.

May 2020 in Review

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You can’t say that 2020 has not been interesting so far. The Covid-19 saga continued throughout May. I certainly continued to think about it, including a fun quote from The Stand, but my mind began turning to other topics.

 

Most frightening and/or depressing story:

  • Potential for long-term drought in some important food-producing regions around the globe should be ringing alarm bells. It’s a good thing that our political leaders’ crisis management skills have been tested by shorter-term, more obvious crises and they have passed with flying colors…doh!

Most hopeful story:

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

  • There are unidentified flying objects out there. They may or may not be aliens, that has not been identified. But they are objects, they are flying, and they are unidentified.

“supporting” ecosystem services in cities

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This long article makes a distinction between services provided by natural and semi-natural areas in cities, and a concept of a city as a whole as an ecosystem that provides services. What it reminded me of, though, is the distinction between the UN’s definition of “regulating” ecosystem services and “supporting” ecosystem services.

• Regulating ecosystem services, such as control of stormwater discharge, mitigation of heat in urban areas, mitigation of noise, etc.

• Supporting ecosystem services, such as provision of habitats for urban biodiversity, provision of pollinators for urban farms, etc.

Journal of Landscape and Urban Planning

In the engineering world I inhabit, we have the regulating services reasonably well figured out. We don’t always do a great job of implementing and enforcing, and we exempt too many projects, but basically we have cost-effective standards and best practices for things like flood management and water pollution reduction.

The supporting ecosystem services are mostly not even on our radar. And that means that when we are designing for flood or water quality objectives, our designs are not as green as they might be if we took biodiversity and habitat into account. It might not even cost more to do that, but it would require a more expansive way of thinking. To do that, we would need to communicate effectively to the decision makers and then the rank and file just why they should care.

the emerging science of aquatic system connectivity

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JAWRA has a nice literature review on this topic, particularly the science of how wetlands function hydrologically based on their placement in the watershed. I can see a lot of useful applications in both urban and rural hydrology. In my experience, and particularly on the urban end, there is very little hard science built into our legal and policy frameworks on this topic, for example in municipal drainage codes and stormwater management requirements.