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Urban areas are dynamic ecological systems defined by interdependent biological, physical, and social components. The emergent structure and heterogeneity of urban landscapes drives biotic outcomes in these areas, and such spatial patterns are often attributed to the unequal stratification of wealth and power in human societies. Despite these patterns, few studies have effectively considered structural inequalities as drivers of ecological and evolutionary outcomes and have instead focused on indicator variables such as neighborhood wealth. In this analysis, we explicitly integrate ecology, evolution, and social processes to emphasize the relationships that bind social inequities—specifically racism—and biological change in urbanized landscapes. We draw on existing research to link racist practices, including residential segregation, to the heterogeneous patterns of flora and fauna observed by urban ecologists. In the future, urban ecology and evolution researchers must consider how systems of racial oppression affect the environmental factors that drive biological change in cities. Conceptual integration of the social and ecological sciences has amassed considerable scholarship in urban ecology over the past few decades, providing a solid foundation for incorporating environmental justice scholarship into urban ecological and evolutionary research. Such an undertaking is necessary to deconstruct urbanization’s biophysical patterns and processes, inform equitable and anti-racist initiatives promoting justice in urban conservation, and strengthen community resilience to global environmental change.
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Socialscape Ecology: Integrating Social Features and Processes into Spatially Explicit Marine Conservation Planning
Conservation planning is the process of locating, implementing, and maintaining areas that are managed to promote the persistence of biodiversity, ecosystem function, and human use. In this review, we analyze the ways in which social processes have been integrated into Marxan, a spatially explicit conservation planning tool used as one step in a broader process to select the location and size of protected areas. Drawing on 89 peer-reviewed articles published between 2005 and 2020, we analyzed the ways in which human activity, values, and processes are spatialized in the environment, something we call socialscape ecology. A socialscape ecology approach to conservation planning considers not only the spatial configuration of human activity in a land or seascape but also the underlying drivers of these activities, how resource use rights and access operate in an area, and how resource users contribute to data collection and decision making. Our results show that there has been a small but statistically significant increase in the total number of cost variables into Marxan analysis over time, with uneven performance across seven of the nine categories assessed. One notable area of improvement has been the increase over time in number of studies integrating socio-environmental change (e.g., climate change) in their analysis. Including accurate, context-specific, and detailed accounts of social features and processes within land and seascapes is essential for developing conservation plans that are cost-effective, ecologically sound, socially desirable, and just.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1923707
- PAR ID:
- 10537494
- Publisher / Repository:
- Sustainability
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Sustainability
- Volume:
- 16
- Issue:
- 14
- ISSN:
- 2071-1050
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 6078
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3390/su16146078
