The Ecosystem Concept as a Framework for Studying Urban Areas: Salt Lake County, Utah, USA and Suva, Fiji Islands
John Lowry
Time: 12–1 pm
Venue: GEO01A Tutorial Room, Marine Campus
Urbanization and an increasing demand for water in urban areas are two important challenges of the 21st century, particularly in the western United States. Given the many potential benefits offered by urban trees, few have questioned the benefits of promoting the cultivation of more urban trees. However urban landscaping in many western cities in the US has been shown to consume as much as 50% of the municipal water budget. In this presentation I introduce the concept of the Urban Ecosystem as a framework for studying interactions among spatial patterns and processes in urban areas. I show how household characteristics (e.g. income, education), urban form (e.g. street density, lot size), and the geophysical landscape (e.g. soils, local precipitation) are related to the distribution and abundance of urban tree canopy in Salt Lake County, Utah. I also describe an innovative approach to estimate residential irrigation water demand for metropolitan Salt Lake County using spatial data on urban vegetation, water-loss rates for different landscaping types, the efficiency with which the landscape is irrigated, and local climatic factors. I conclude by opening a discussion on how the urban ecosystem framework could be used to identify relevant research questions aimed at finding solutions to the problem of squatter settlements in Suva, Fiji.
