85 research outputs found

    Implementing Municipal Tree Planting: Los Angeles Million-Tree Initiative

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    Urban forests are increasingly being seen as an important infrastructure that can help cities remediate their environmental impacts. This work reports on the first steps in implementing a million tree program in Los Angeles and the ways such a biogenic—living—infrastructure has been approached. Numbers of studies have been done to quantify the benefits of urban forests, but little has been written on the process of implementing urban tree planting programs. The investigative methods were primarily qualitative, involving interviews, attending meetings and conducting literature reviews. Results indicate that multiple nonprofit and city agency programs are involved in planting and maintaining trees and this has required coordination among groups that here-to-fore were unaccustomed to having to collaborate. The main finding that emerge from this research is that the implementation of such a program in Los Angeles is more complicated than it may seem due to several interacting factors: the need to rely on multiple public and private organizations to put trees into the ground and to maintain them; coordination of these multiple efforts must be centralized, but requires a great deal of time and effort and maybe resisted by some of the partners; funding for planting and long term maintenance must be pieced together from multiple sources; acceptance of trees by residents varies by neighborhood as does tree canopy cover; appropriate nursery supply can be limited; the location of the program within the city administration is determined by who initiates the program

    Confronting Standards and Nomenclature in Spatial Data Infrastructures: A Case Study of Urban Los Angeles County Geospatial Water Management Data

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    This paper examines the problem of insufficient and often inaccurate water management boundary data in California. Due to fragmented water management in California, no central government agency is responsible for coordinating water data collection, authorship, and dissemination and maintenance. Despite statewide and county scale efforts to build spatial data infrastructures that include water data, the independent and isolated development of geospatial data sustains competing nomenclatures of water management features and poor boundary data in publically available data sets. This paper examines these nomenclature and spatial inconsistencies and calls for assigning standardized numeric identifiers for California’s public and private water management entities. We contend that resolving the development of a universal ID system not only helps reconcile nomenclature differences propagated across data sets but also serves as a vehicle for forwarding an institutionally integrated water management spatial data infrastructure

    Groundwater exchange pools in Los Angeles: An innovative example of adaptive management

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    Across California, Groundwater Sustainability Agencies (GSAs) are devising plans to reduce long-term overdraft. As part of the 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, GSAs will submit plans in 2020-2022, which detail strategies to bring groundwater use into balance by 2040. Planning processes must assemble stakeholders and estimate sustainable yields of groundwater, quantify existing pumping, describe future options to limit overdraft, and identify funding. GSAs are actively searching for ways to stretch limited supplies and sustainably use the underground storage space created by decades of overdraft, drawing on lessons of previous regional agreements

    Linking Ecology and Economics for Ecosystem Management

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    This article outlines an approach, based on ecosystem services, for assessing the trade-offs inherent in managing humans embedded in ecological systems. Evaluating these trade-offs requires an understanding of the biophysical magnitudes of the changes in ecosystem services that result from human actions, and of the impact of these changes on human welfare.We summarize the state of the art of ecosystem services?based management and the information needs for applying it. Three case studies of Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites?coastal, urban, and agricultural? illustrate the usefulness, information needs, quantification possibilities, and methods for this approach. One example of the application of this approach, with rigorously established service changes and valuations taken from the literature, is used to illustrate the potential for full economic valuation of several agricultural landscape management options, including managing for water quality, biodiversity, and crop productivity

    Trees Grow on Money: Urban Tree Canopy Cover and Environmental Justice

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    This study examines the distributional equity of urban tree canopy (UTC) cover for Baltimore, MD, Los Angeles, CA, New York, NY, Philadelphia, PA, Raleigh, NC, Sacramento, CA, and Washington, D.C. using high spatial resolution land cover data and census data. Data are analyzed at the Census Block Group levels using Spearman\u27s correlation, ordinary least squares regression (OLS), and a spatial autoregressive model (SAR). Across all cities there is a strong positive correlation between UTC cover and median household income. Negative correlations between race and UTC cover exist in bivariate models for some cities, but they are generally not observed using multivariate regressions that include additional variables on income, education, and housing age. SAR models result in higher r-square values compared to the OLS models across all cities, suggesting that spatial autocorrelation is an important feature of our data. Similarities among cities can be found based on shared characteristics of climate, race/ethnicity, and size. Our findings suggest that a suite of variables, including income, contribute to the distribution of UTC cover. These findings can help target simultaneous strategies for UTC goals and environmental justice concerns
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