UEDLAB | Urban Ecology and Design Laboratory

Rebuilding the Coastline, but at What Cost?...

Fri, 24 May 2013 20:04:24 -0400

Rebuilding the Coastline, but at What Cost? http://nyti.ms/10BD5Mt

“I said, look people, you built on a marsh island, it’s oxidizing under your feet — it’s shrinking — and that exacerbates the sea level rise,” said Dr. Hales, director of the Barnegat Bay Partnership, an estuary program financed by the Environmental Protection Agency. “Do you really want to throw good money after bad?”

Their answer? Yes.

Nearly seven months after Hurricane Sandy decimated the northeastern coastline, destroying houses and infrastructure and dumping 11 billion gallons of untreated and partially treated sewage into rivers, bays, canals and even some streets, coastal communities have been racing against the clock to prepare for Memorial Day.

Damage to the coastline was severe. In New Jersey, 94 percent of beaches and dunes were damaged, with 14 percent suffering a major loss of dune vegetation and beach erosion of 100 feet or more; 43 percent were moderately affected, losing 50 to 100 feet of beach, according to an assessment by the American Littoral Society

NYT: Predator and Prey, a Delicate Dance. Not meddling with...

Tue, 21 May 2013 16:09:00 -0400

NYT: Predator and Prey, a Delicate Dance.

Not meddling with nature is central to America’s modern wilderness tradition, but should we make an exception to save a population of wolves from extinction?

This editorial highlights the debates around wildlife management, highlighting the critical finding that”a healthy ecosystem depends critically on the presence of top predators like wolves when large herbivores, like moose, are present. Without top predators, prey tend to become overabundant and decimate plants and trees that many species of birds, mammals and insects depend on.” In order to establish and manage ecosystems, scientists and practitioners will have to determine what role we should play in the managing species dynamics.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/09/opinion/save-the-wolves-of-isle-royale-national-park.html

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Wed, 24 Apr 2013 23:58:41 -0400

//How do you define the problem of coastal development in an...

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 00:23:25 -0400

//How do you define the problem of coastal development in an uncertain climate?
//What makes the Northeast vulnerable to mega storms like Sandy?
//What are the biggest challenges and opportunities for coastal climate change adaptation moving forward?

[Un]natural Disasters// The post-Sandy blue print for rebuilding in CT

a collective strategy brainSTORM

Tuesday, April 23, 2013 // 11:00 – 1:00 pm
Burke Auditorium //195 Prospect St. // New Haven, CT

·         Alex Felson, Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, Yale School of Architecture, Assistant Professor

·         George Kral, Town of Guilford, Connecticut, Planner

·         Jennifer Pagach, Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection, Climate Specialist

·         Adam Whelchel, The Nature Conservancy in Connecticut, Director of Science

·         Tim Terway, Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, Doctoral Student

//RSVP here: http://tinyurl.com/cx8zttfPlease join us for this event hosted by SIGs galore —> LUCY, RRAD, Fresh&Salty and sponsored by the Yale Climate and Energy Institute. //RSVP here: http://tinyurl.com/cx8zttf

Experimental Landscapes: Alexander Felson on Ecology and...

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 09:38:00 -0400

Experimental Landscapes: Alexander Felson on Ecology and Design

http://urbanomnibus.net/2013/03/experimental-landscapes-alexander-felson-on-ecology-and-design/

A Comparison of Salt Marsh Migration Rates onto Lawn and...

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 14:30:07 -0500

A Comparison of Salt Marsh Migration Rates onto Lawn and Forested Landscapes

Katharine Gehron, a first-year MESc student in the UEDLAB, has been awarded a Berkley Conservation Scholarship (up to $6,000) this week to fund her summer research on salt marsh migration in urban areas. Kate’s advisers—Dr. Alexander Felson, director of the UEDLAB, and Dr. Shimon Anisfeld, an expert on salt marsh ecology and marsh migration—will be jointly guiding her research. Kate’s study will take place on the Connecticut coast of Long Island Sound and will compare salt marsh migration rates onto natural, forested landscapes with migration rates onto anthropogenic, lawn-dominated landscapes. At this time, little is known about marsh migration in urban areas.

This research has important management implications. Sea-level rise in the Northeast threatens to drown marshes, which are a critical component of the green infrastructure that protects coastal communities from the destructive energy of storm surges. They also provide essential habitat for fish, birds, and a variety of invertebrates—habitat that is both ecologically and economically important. Kate’s research will improve scientific understanding of marsh migration and help inform the Guilford Coastal Resilience Plan, a joint effort of the Town of Guilford, the UEDLAB, and The Nature Conservancy. The results of this research will help land managers create land-use policies that can help combat marsh drowning by promoting rapid marsh migration.

The Berkley Conservation Scholarship program was established to “fund internships for students from Yale (primarily from F&ES) to work with organizations which are involved in the conservation of land in the United States, to help develop and apply new, innovative strategies for preserving open space.” Berkley Conservation Scholars are chosen according to their ability to meet the program’s goals of engaging new communities in conservation; expanding the conservation toolkit; and ensuring the permanence of conservation gains.

These Scary Maps Explain What Sea Level Rise Will Mean in Boston

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 09:32:00 -0500

These Scary Maps Explain What Sea Level Rise Will Mean in Boston:

From The Atlantic:

Coastal cities are now living in what Brian Swett calls a “post-Sandy environment.” In this new reality, there is no more denying the specter of sea-level rise or punting on plans to prepare for it. And there is no more need to talk of climate change in abstract predictions and science-speak. We now know exactly what it could look like.

This comment and larger article echoes findings we’re uncovering through our coastal adaptation work along the Long Island Sound. This is coming on the heels of Nemo reminding us here in Connecticut that increased storm intensity is a year-round phenomenon.

On Decimated Shore, a Second Life for Christmas Trees By MICHAEL...

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 09:09:00 -0500

On Decimated Shore, a Second Life for Christmas Trees

By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ

Published: February 3, 2013

Thousands of naked Christmas trees have been arranged along the beach in Long Beach, N.Y., as part of an unusual plan to restore the protective dunes washed away by Hurricane Sandy.

This was a concept I had sketched out and was considering proposing for the Bridgeport Bioretention garden site. It links restoration to religion with the potential to create dunes as part of the ritual of Christmas. This would help ensure that the practice continues. Just as trees are farmed and cut and then brought into the home from “nature” (through individual labor) the domesticated tree can subsequently be used to enhance the natural process of dune formation. This bypasses sending trees to waste sites.

Design for Biodiversity: Architectural Responses to Urban...

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 22:53:58 -0500

Design for Biodiversity: Architectural Responses to Urban Ecology

The 2013 Hans and Roger Strauch Symposium on Sustainable Design

Urban Ecology is a field of inquiry concerned with the relations between living organisms and their urban environments. Since its emergence in the 1970s, Urban Ecology has produced a wealth of research and has led to the adoption of policies geared towards the preservation of species in and around cities. Most of these actions have addressed the city at the scale of urban planning. Architecture, at the building scale, has thus far not been extensively tackled, and so the questions arise: How might architecture actively support multi-species habitats? Can these habitats help us replace the existing, fossil fuel dependent, mechanistic systems that underpin our settlements with low impact, ecologically integrated systems that leverage natural sources and sinks of energy and material processing capacity? How does reimagining the city as a locus for multi-species mutualistic interaction change the way we think about urban form and phenomenology? And finally, what are the appropriate models to study? These questions offer fertile ground for experimentation in urban ecological thinking and practice, which seeks to extend access to a variety of species and systems, lending flexibility to function, and enabling more effective control of energy, material, and capital flows.

This year’s Strauch symposium will address these questions by focusing on the extended threshold between building and environment. In all ecosystems such zones are the locus of dynamic change driven by evolutionary pressures that emerge at the boundaries of established hierarchies of energy and material transformation. Such places are, by definition, the ideal location for architectural intervention. Urban ecologists and architects will present methods to explore the questions at hand and engage in a discussion to advance research at the intersection of architecture and ecology.

Michael Wells, Biodiversity by Design

Biodiverse Urban Design in Theory and Practice

The Bigger Picture: Aims and Actions in Urban Ecology

Michael Hensel, Research Centre for Architecture and Tectonics, Oslo School of Architecture and Design

Kevin Pratt, Department of Architecture, Cornell University

Marianne Krasny, Department of Natural Resources, Cornell University

Moderated by Caroline O’Donnell, Department of Architecture, Cornell University

Boundary Conditions: The Building Envelope as Extended Threshold

Michael Hensel + Jeffrey Turko, Research Centre for Architecture and Tectonics, Oslo School of Architecture and Design and University of Brighton

Philip Beesley, School of Architecture, University of Waterloo

Mitchell Joachim + Maria Aiolova, TerreformONE

Moderated by Liss C. Werner, School of Architecture, Carnegie Mellon University

Multi-scalar Architectures: Design Ecologies from Micro to Macro

Jenny Sabin + Shu Yang, Department of Architecture, Cornell University and Department of Engineering, University of Pennsylvania

Birger Sevaldson + Søren Sørensen, Oslo School of Architecture and Design

Alexander Felson, School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and School of Architecture, Yale University

Moderated by Dana Cupkova, School of Architecture, Carnegie Mellon University

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Tue, 22 Jan 2013 00:21:49 -0500

UEDLAB and the joiny degree program with SOA put on this...

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 23:18:36 -0500

UEDLAB and the joiny degree program with SOA put on this symposium

2:30 Session 1

2:30 - 2:40 Introduction/Overview

2:40 - 3:00 Vincent Lee, civil engineer, Arup

3:00-3:20 Joe Famelry, geomorphologist, Woods Hold Group

3:20-3:40 discussion
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3:40-4:00 Break

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4:00 Session B

4:00-4:20 David Kozak, CT DEEP-Office of Long Island Sound Programs

4:20-4:40 Albert Wei, urban planner, KPF

4:40-5:00 Amy Leitch, sustainability consultant, Arup

The Future of Zone A

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 11:08:00 -0500

Alex Felson of the UEDLAB will speak on the Future of Zone A in the wake of Climate Change on Thursday, January 10 2013 at the Architectural League of New York.

From the site:

Is it possible, or practical, to deploy ecologically sound design and policy to mitigate adverse climate impacts on waterfront communities? Can “market-based” solutions drive the planning of the city in ways that are ecologically and socially responsible without displacing communities? This public discussion with experts in urban ecology, design, and community planning will present examples of current projects that explore the social, planning, and design challenges for high-risk, and often low-income, coastal areas across the five boroughs, including the Two Bridges neighborhood in Manhattan.

Thursday, January 10, 2013

7:00 p.m.

Rose Auditorium, The Cooper Union 41 Cooper Square, New York, NY

Alex Felson and Tim Terway of the UEDLAB will speak at the...

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 11:01:54 -0500

Alex Felson and Tim Terway of the UEDLAB will speak at the Morris Arboretum’s 24th annual symposium on landscape design. 2013’s event is titled “Critical Interactions: Ecological Research into Landscape Design”. Alex and Tim will present a talk on challenges and opportunities for integrating natural and social science research into the landscape planning and design process. Alex will speak on Friday, January 11 at Connecticut College in New London, CT and Tim on Friday, January 18 at Haverford College in Haverford, PA.

Of Storm Surges and Sea Changes: Urban Adaptation to Rising Waters

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 12:35:00 -0500

The following editorial is written by Katharine Gehron, Timothy Terway and Alexander Felson,

Kate is a master’s student, Tim is a PhD student and Alex Felson is a assistant professor at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and the UEDLAB Contact Kate here.

The public and private infrastructure that underlies metropolitan life—sprawling, reticulate, the product of massive amounts of labor and investment—is essential to public health and stable civic life. We depend on it continuously, yet it is largely invisible until it is compromised. Events such as power-grid failures, road and rail impasses, port closures, and drinking-water contamination are potentially catastrophic and quickly produce states of emergency.

Extreme weather events related to climate change pose grave threats to urban infrastructure, especially in densely settled coastal cities, where millions of people depend on clean running water, transportation corridors, and other services that are produced or provided near sea level, which is predicted to rise between 3 and 6 feet in the next hundred years (Vermeer and Rahmstorf 2009). The extensive damage caused by Hurricane Sandy is likely a sign of things to come, as other extreme weather events of recent years suggest that we are already experiencing the effects of climate change. Coastal cities are home to our most important economic centers and to a disproportionate fraction of the population. We must find ways to mitigate the damage that is sure to be visited upon the most vulnerable, low-lying zones.

We can do this by way of three major approaches: the construction of hard infrastructure such as sea walls, the implementation of “green” infrastructure such as engineered wetlands, and retreat. The first approach involves top-down coordination and significant expenditure of public funds; the second may be more bottom up and may be implemented over time by various alliances between civic groups, nonprofits, the private sector, and government; and the third depends on the ability of insurance companies, FEMA, and homeowners to develop mutually agreeable arrangements that lead to a coordinated response, not conflicts about property that result in gridlock.

Each approach requires very different actions and decisions on the part of the city, regulators, and homeowners, with different associated costs. Hard infrastructure may permit cities to avoid the necessity of tearing down their most flood-prone structures, which may protect neighborhoods as well as business districts. However, hard infrastructure is expensive to build and maintain, and it may fail with little warning, and with serious consequences, especially for people who lack the resources to move out of harm’s way. (The breach of the levees during Hurricane Katrina visited far more tragedy upon poor minorities in New Orleans than it did on those with means.) If we build extensive hard infrastructure, how likely is it that we will learn from the past and distribute risk more equitably? That we will plan for failure? Even if we succeed at these things, the construction of walls and other structures to hold back the sea will take years and will not address short-term exigencies.

The implementation of green infrastructure can be integrated into planned, or managed, retreat from the shoreline, through the replacement of structures and open space with engineered tidal wetlands. While this concept has been accepted in Great Britain and the Netherlands for some time now (see, e.g., French 2006), it is a somewhat shocking and new approach in the U.S.; a recent article in the New York Times described this strategy as “apocalyptic” (“Protecting New York City, Before Next Time”). Is it? Current sea level rise projections suggest that planned retreat from rising seas, in conjunction with the establishment of salt marshes, is a practical and sustainable response to a process that is already under way. Yet for the wave attenuation function of the marshes to be significant, a wide expanse of the shoreline will likely have to be converted to marsh. It is unclear whether enough urban land could be set aside, whether through voluntary sale of private property (inefficient and unlikely) or government fiat (a political hornet’s nest), to create sufficient marshland to make this option feasible.

Some of these tensions and problems are reflected in the contributions to “Rising Currents,” a 2010 MoMA exhibition organized by the museum’s curator of architecture and design, exhibited the responses of several teams of architects and landscape architects to design challenges produced by sea level rise in New York City, an issue that has heretofore been largely neglected, as is clear in the remark of one tenant of a flooded office building following Hurricane Sandy: “We had prepared for an emergency. The emergency we had prepared for was an act of terrorism, not this” (“Future Is in Limbo for the Damaged Buildings Close to the Water’s Edge”).

Each team contributing to “Rising Currents” proposed a design solution for a different section of New York Harbor. “A New Urban Ground,” prepared by dlandstudio and the Architecture Research Office, proposes retrofitting the shore of Lower Manhattan with engineered wetlands that would protect this part of the city from tides that, in coming years, may inundate (according to the project numbers) a fifth of the region at high tide and more than half of the region during extreme storm surges. Can modifications to the shoreline buffer the sea? These wetlands are intended to absorb stormwater, reduce wave height and force, and reduce erosion. However, research on the benefits of wetlands for wave attenuation is limited, and the depth of wetlands required is typically greater than what is currently available. The proposal also calls for porous streets that would absorb stormwater and help to reduce the amount of flooding that would occur on impervious concrete. Pipes carrying sewage, water, gas, and electricity would remain buried but would be placed in a waterproof enclosure. Flood mitigation and the waterproofing of sewer lines would help reduce water contamination resulting from combined sewer overflow during extreme storm events, a longstanding problem, but the replacement of substreet pipes with waterproof, insulated pipes would be very expensive and disruptive. It seems that the ideas presented in the proposal are a good start to a necessary conversation but in need of further critical analysis and especially engagement with local populations and stakeholders, as well as city officials.

Such civic engagement is an essential part of coastal adaptation planning, a process that raises some difficult social issues. Who will stay along the shoreline by choice, and who by necessity? What will the distribution of risk be like, and will we, as a society, help those with few resources find new places to live at higher elevations? What will be the costs of such dislocations to community coherence and civic identity? The questions raised by the prospect of retreat are disturbing and complex. By underestimating the scale of sea level rise and attempting to hold it off primarily with fortifications, we may end up spending great sums of public money to build structures that may not be able to withstand the stresses that will be placed upon them and that may therefore fail, creating particularly disastrous results for underprivileged communities To adapt to sea level rise in cities, we will need civic collaboration across scales, from the federal government to neighborhood groups, of a kind with midcentury wartime efforts, when citizens grew their own food in victory gardens, saved metal scraps, and worked together in ways both large and small to respond to a crisis. We may need to balance the construction of large-scale hard infrastructure with local efforts to green the coastline.

It remains an open question whether such an integrated enterprise is possible—whether opposing interests will splinter fragile coalitions and create secondary conflicts that complicate the primary issue, or whether factions will manage to reconcile in order to solve urgent problems through the formation of new social (and physical) structures in a changed world. Contemporary civic discord suggests there will be plenty of conflict in coming years over property rights, government assistance, public spending, and other issues related to states of emergency and natural disasters. Time will tell.

-Katharine Gehron

References:

Vermeer, M., and S. Rahmstorf. 2009. Global sea level linked to global temperature. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 106(61):21527–21532.

French, P. W. 2006. Managed realignment: The developing story of a comparatively new approach to soft engineering, Estuarine Coastal and Shelf Science 67(3):409–423.

Feuer, Alan. “Protecting New York City, Before Next Time.” New York Times, November 3, 2012. Accessed 11/28/2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/nyregion/protecting-new-york-city-before-next-time.html?pagewanted=all.

http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/category/rising-currents

Kleinfield, N.R. “Future Is in Limbo for the Damaged Buildings Close to the Water’s Edge.” New York Times, November 5, 2012. Accessed 11/28/2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/05/nyregion/damage-unclear-future-in-limbo-for-some-buildings-in-lower-manhattan.html?pagewanted=all.

Coastal Resilience Planning Meeting Spurs Heated Debate about Town's Future

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 11:03:00 -0500

Coastal Resilience Planning Meeting Spurs Heated Debate about Town's Future:

Last night the town hosted a Coastal Resilience Plan Meeting intended to develop options and strategies to address critical needs of the town as we look to the future of Guilford.

The presentation that followed, lead by Nathan Frohling of The Nature Conservancy and Alex Felson of Yale School of Forestry, drove home that regardless of what options were pursued, action needed to be taken.

Man-made salt marshes fail to meet European demands on plants-study

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 02:00:02 -0500

Artificial salt marshes did not perform as well as natural ones based on a study by Mossman et al. 2012. Does managed coastal realignment create saltmarshes with ‘equivalent biological characteristics’ to natural reference sites? Journal of Applied Ecology. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2664.2012.02198.x

These results challenge the argument that mitigation is a valuable means of compensating for wetland removal. These are not exhibiting “equivalent biological characteristics.”

The team studied 18 artificial salt marshes in England and found less divers marshland with many marsh plants (e.g. sea lavender, sea arrowgrass or sea plantain) under-represented compared to natural marshes. 17 accidentally created salt marshes were similarly lacking in plant variety.

Alex Felson and Tim Terway of the UEDLAB will help lead a public...

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 21:53:00 -0500

Alex Felson and Tim Terway of the UEDLAB will help lead a public workshop in Guilford, CT on Monday, November 26 at 7:30pm. The public meeting is part of Connecticut’s Coastal Resilience Plan which the UEDLAB has been working on in partnership with the The Nature Conservancy, the Town of Guilford, and other consultants towards increasing the resilience of coastal settlements in the wake of Hurricane Sandy-scale events. The workshop is geared to advance ongoing efforts in Guilford’s coastal adaptation planning process to address the challenges of sea-level rise, storm surge, and increasing storm intensity and frequency.

10/27/2012 Coastal Adaptation workday in Bridgeport,...

Sat, 03 Nov 2012 10:20:30 -0400

10/27/2012 Coastal Adaptation workday in Bridgeport, Connecticut

Yale’s UEDLAB built green infrastructure working with The City of Bridgeport, the local community of Seaside Village, EPA, YUDW, UCONN, and al fresco.

On Saturday The Nature Conservancy came out just before Hurricane Sandy to mound earth and plant red maples in part of a constructed floodplain.

For Years, Warnings That It Could Happen Here

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 15:28:46 -0400

For Years, Warnings That It Could Happen Here:

On Tuesday, city and state officials took their first tentative steps toward considering major infrastructure changes that could protect the city’s fragile shores from repeated disastrous damage.

Visualization of greenhouse gas emissions Climate scientists are...

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 23:17:00 -0400

Visualization of greenhouse gas emissions

Climate scientists are creating a three-dimensional carbon dioxide emissions map of the city of Los Angeles that will detail greenhouse gas emissions for individual buildings, road segments and power generators over time. The map uses computer modeling, traffic conditions, local air pollution reports, tax assessment records and other public data. Eventually, authors say, the maps will incorporate data from satellites, as well as measurements taken on the ground and by aircraft.

(via Scientists mapping Los Angeles sources of greenhouse gas emissions)

Felson Comments: Here is a It represents our best guess at this hidden urban condition. The maps were based on various data but no physical measurements.