UERL Biocomplexity Research Program

Biocomplexity I

Biocomplexity II

Modeling the Interactions Among Urban Development, Land Cover Change, and Bird Diversity

Marina Alberti (PI), Paul Waddell, John Marzluff, & Mark Handcock

Project Description

The interactions between urban development and ecological processes are extraordinarily complex. Urban development evolves over time and space as the outcome of microscopic interactions of individual choices and actions taken by multiple agents—households, businesses, developers, and governments. Households and businesses make decisions about social and economic activities and their location. Developers make decisions about land development and redevelopment. Governments make decisions about investing in infrastructures and services and adopting policies and regulations. These decisions affect ecosystem structures and functions through the conversion of land, the use of resources, and the generation of emissions and waste. Birds provide a powerful signal of changes in landscape configuration, composition, and function. Urbanization affects birds directly and indirectly. It directly changes ecosystem processes, habitat, and food supply. Indirectly, it affects birds’ predators, competitors, and disease organisms. These effects lead to significant changes in the population biology of birds in urban areas, with resulting effects on bird communities. Environmental changes at local and regional scales, in turn, affect human wellbeing and preferences, and the decisions people make.

Although extensive urban research has focused on the dynamics of urban systems and their ecological interactions, these diverse urban processes have yet to be synthesized into one coherent modeling framework (Alberti and Waddell 2000). Simulation models of urban and ecological dynamics have evolved in separate knowledge domains. While both of these research areas deal with human-environmental interactions, they do so with very different emphases, scale, methodology and objectives. Thus, simply linking existing models may not adequately address urban ecosystem behavior because the complexity and uncertainty of interactions between human and environmental processes are not adequately represented in the models. Scholars of both urban economics and ecology have begun to recognize the importance of explicitly representing human and ecological processes in modeling urban systems. This requires modeling biocomplexity—its drivers, patterns, processes, and impacts.

This proposal develops an integrated strategy to model the urban development and land cover change dynamics in the Central Puget Sound Region, and their impacts on bird diversity. We aim to develop a model of urban development and land cover change that can interface with a large set of ecosystem processes. In this proposal we focus on linking urban development to bird diversity as a test case for our modeling approach. We build on several modeling traditions—urban economics, landscape ecology, bird population dynamics, and complex system science—each offering different perspective on modeling urban ecological interactions. Instead of separately simulating urban growth and its impacts on birds’ habitats, we propose a framework to simulate metropolitan areas as they evolve through the dynamic interactions between urban development and ecological processes, and to link them through a spatially explicit representation of the landscape. We apply Bayesian networks and a Multi-Agent Simulation approach for their ability to support complex inference modeling in problem domains that have inherent uncertainty. We aim to understand how best to model complexity and uncertainty of coupled socioeconomic and biophysical processes in metropolitan regions and their interactions with the policy domain.

We propose to build on the UrbanSim model developed by Waddell (2000), a dynamic microsimulation model of household and business location, and real estate development. This work is part of a UW-sponsored effort to link urban and ecological models within the entire Cascade Region of the Northwest United States. The Puget Sound Regional Synthesis Model (PRISM) links models of urban processes with hydrologic and atmospheric models to form an unusually well integrated model design. The emphasis is on providing tools for policy makers to explore the links between human behaviors and environmental change.