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Communities are faced with the challenge of meeting regulatory requirements mandating reductions in water pollution from stormwater and combined sewer overflows (CSO). Green stormwater infrastructure and gray stormwater infrastructure are two types of water management strategies communities can use to address water pollution. In this study, we used long-term control plans from 25 U.S. cities to synthesize: the types of gray and green infrastructure being used by communities to address combined sewer overflows; the types of goals set; biophysical characteristics of each city; and factors associated with the governance of stormwater management. These city characteristics were then used to identify common characteristics of “green leader” cities—those that dedicated >20% of the control plan budget in green infrastructure. Five “green leader” cities were identified: Milwaukee, WI, Philadelphia, PA, Syracuse, NY, New York City, NY, and Buffalo, NY. These five cities had explicit green infrastructure goals targeting the volume of stormwater or percentage of impervious cover managed by green infrastructure. Results suggested that the management scale and complexity of the management system are less important factors than the ability to harness a “policy window” to integrate green infrastructure into control plans. Two case studies—Philadelphia, PA, and Milwaukee, WI—indicated that green leader cities have a long history of building momentum for green infrastructure through a series of phases from experimentation, demonstration, and finally—in the case of Philadelphia—a full transition in the approach used to manage CSOs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the recent global financial crisis heightened awareness of the linkages between global financial capital and urban spatial pattern, the timing of urban development – largely thought to be market driven – is not fully understood. Parcel-level studies of urban land-use change, which often use hazard models to investigate if and when development occurs, offer an opportunity to juxtapose the extent to which decisions to develop individual plots of farmland into housing are driven by market forces, the unique characteristics of the land and its intraurban location, or policies such as transportation infrastructure and municipal annexation. Using residential completion data in the Phoenix, Arizona region from 1992 to 2014, a period of dramatic commodity, fuel, and home price swings, and land cover imagery, we develop a parcel-level hazard model to gauge the relative impacts of market, policy, and place-based drivers of land change. We find limited evidence of induced development associated with freeway planning, that annexation and development are closely linked and moreso during economic booms, high fuel prices spur development in the region's core, and agricultural and urban land rents affect the timing of development. This study advances our understanding of development decision- making, policy impacts, and urban land-use change modeling and provides an empirical connection between local and global drivers of Greenfield development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Rapid urbanization of the Phoenix Metropolitan Area exemplifies the dominant US Southwest urban growth pattern of the past six decades. Using a combination of multitemporal land cover data, gradient analysis, and landscape metrics, we quantify and characterize spatiotemporal patterns of land fragmentation observed in Phoenix. We analyze historical, qualitative data to identify five major socio-ecological drivers critical to understanding the urbanization processes and fragmentation patterns: population dynamics, water provisioning, technology and transportation, institutional factors, and topography. A second objective is to assess the applicability and accuracy of National Land cover Database (NLCD)-—a widely used land cover dataset—-to detect and measure urban growth and land fragmentation patterns in the relatively treeless desert biome of the US Southwest. In contrast to studies in the temperate eastern USA where NLCD has proved inaccurate for detection of exurban development, our study demonstrates that NLCD is a reliable data source for measuring land use in the southwest, even in low-density environments. By combining qualitative analyses of social-ecological drivers with fragmentation analyses, we move toward an improved understanding of urbanization and insights on the human modification framework used widely in land change science. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: As concern grows regarding urban sprawl and forest and agricultural land preservation, the effectiveness of land-use policies in shaping land-use change warrants further study. We evaluate the impact of county-level zoning laws, the most predominant land use policy in the USA, and land rents on the relative amounts of forest, agricultural, and developed land, while controlling for demographic information and taxation rates. Over the past decades, southern Indiana has experienced forest regrowth on private lands, but this regrowth has declined in recent years with increased conversion of open space for urban residential development. We develop a model of land-use shares in 40 southern Indiana counties based on the net benefits to agriculture, forestland, and urban uses using a maximum likelihood estimation of a Dirichlet distribution. We find agricultural land rent and indicators of land productivity are the most important predictors of the proportion of agriculture and urban uses. Forest use is better explained by shifting regional economic structure and hilly terrain. Counties with a greater proportion of their work force in the service sectors have a greater proportion of land forested. Finally, to some extent zoning may protect agricultural land in the region, although land rents, land characteristics, and population are strong predictors of the ratio of agriculture to urban use. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Many government and private programs provide incentives for non-industrial private forest (NIPF) owners. Due to the complexity of this web of programs, the incentives of the programs are unclear. We focus on four specific programs that represent different rule structures—a federal cost-share program, a state tax incentive program, a nationwide private stewardship program, and a local private conservation organization. We perform institutional analysis of the formal and informal rules of the programs based on literature review, discussions with officers, and formal guidelines of the programs. We classify different types of rule structures, and explain them in relation to goals and organizational structures of the programs. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• Motivating collective action is important to address environmental change. • We analyze the impact of space and time on collective invasive species management. • Spatial patterns influence collective action with relevance to institutional design. • Social and biophysical factors also influence collective action in different ways. Environmental governance research has discovered much about what drives collective action to address human-environment issues, including factors such as risk perceptions and self-efficacy. Yet the design of many studies limits our ability to draw conclusions about collective action under conditions of environmental change, especially across spatial or temporal scales. In this study, we integrate social and biophysical data—assessing data over time and examining the influence of space—to analyze efforts by community members to manage rapid environmental change in the form of an invasive plant (Mikania micrantha) in community forests in Chitwan, Nepal. Invasive species are an increasingly complex ethical, cultural, and ecological issue that is becoming more pressing with global environmental and social changes. We combine household surveys, ecological surveys, and spatial data in Bayesian hierarchical linear models to explore changes in the drivers of collective action since initial household surveys in 2014. We find that risk perceptions, reliance on forest resources, perceptions of forest safety, and M. micrantha abundance were the most influential factors in our models. Additionally, our findings suggest that the influence of M. micrantha abundance on collective action varies across spatial scales, indicating important interactions between social and biophysical drivers of collective action. Ultimately, our results highlight the importance of considering social and biophysical factors across space and time to inform the design of institutions that will be effective in addressing collection action problems tied to environmental change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The research presented here explores the spatial patterns in the landscape near Bloomington, Indiana, where urban and suburban development is expanding into formerly agricultural and forested areas. Landscape fragmentation has potentially detrimental impacts on provision of services and functions of forest ecosystems. We investigate the statistical relationship between landscape fragmentation and various socioeconomic, biophysical, and spatial variables associated with land use and land cover at the scale of individual, privately owned parcels. We find that the diversity of land uses is much higher, at the aggregate level and at the parcel level, in areas that are zoned to allow for the highest density in housing and smallest lot sizes. These results are still robust after accounting for key geophysical and accessibility characteristics of the individual parcels. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]