Researchers Study Charlotte’s “Green Mystery”
Charlotte, N.C., which has experienced dynamic urban growth without losing all the pastoral charms of the North Carolina piedmont, may offer scientists an ideal living laboratory to study what makes a “human-dominated ecosystem” tick. Researchers at UNC Charlotte, led by Ross Meentemeyer, Geography and Earth Sciences, have been awarded $300,000 by NSF’s Urban Long-Term Research Areas Exploratory Research Projects (ULTRA-EX) competition to study Charlotte’s complex urban environment.
Charlotte is a rapidly growing city. Charlotte is also a green city. Some people might see that as a contradiction.
In Charlotte, there are wooded lots and remnant farms plots almost in the shadow of the towers of the nation’s second largest financial center. Social scientists find the co-existence of strong urban growth and persistent green areas puzzling. The National Science Foundation thinks that Charlotte’s complex environment might make an interesting site for long-term research in urban growth and sustainability.
Researchers at UNC Charlotte, led by Ross Meentemeyer, Geography and Earth Sciences, have been awarded $300,000 by NSF’s Urban Long-Term Research Areas Exploratory Research Projects (ULTRA-EX) competition – one of 17 national awards given for pilot urban research projects. The exploratory projects are research trials that may lead to the later award of an ULTRA site – the establishment of a long-term study site with major NSF funding for urban-environment research.
Charlotte, which has experienced dynamic urban growth without losing all the pastoral charms of the North Carolina piedmont, may offer scientists an ideal living laboratory to study what makes a “human-dominated ecosystem” tick.
“We have the opportunity to track and understand what is going on because we are catching Charlotte early enough in its growth trajectory,” said Meentemeyer, the ULTRA-EX grant’s principal investigator.
“Because of that we have a chance to determine if there are possibilities for alternative futures for Charlotte. Charlotte might be one of the best examples of a city projected to grow so fast and so big — we have a unique opportunity here to watch development,” Meentemeyer said.
Meentemeyer, a landscape ecologist and Executive Director of UNC Charlotte’s Center for Applied Geographic Information Science, heads the inter-disciplinary research team. Other members of the research group are Jean-Claude Thill, Knight Distinguished Professor of Geography and Earth Sciences at UNC Charlotte, who is an authority on urban systems and modeling; William Ribarsky, Chair of the Department of Computer Science and Director of the Charlotte Visualization Center; Chunhua Wang, an environmental economist from the Renaissance Computing Institute branch at UNC Charlotte; and Todd BenDor, assistant professor in the Department of City & Regional Planning at UNC Chapel Hill and an authority on land use planning and public policy.
While the project will perform basic research on urban dynamics and links between economic and environmental sustainability, the science will be tied to real life issues and will closely involve the ongoing work of local agencies and land management professionals.
The Charlotte ULTRA exploratory project will focus particularly on the issue of the “persistence” of forest and farm lands within the urban boundaries. In Meentemeyer’s words, the project aims to answer the essential question: “Hidden in Charlotte’s current dynamic urban environment, are there alternative futures for growth where urbanization, forest and working lands can co-exist in an economic and environmentally sustainable fashion?”
At the heart of the project is a two-year plan to develop a complex and sophisticated computer model that will allow the researchers and land planning partners to examine such “alternative futures” that might result from a wide variety of new variables – new laws and regulations, changing economic, political or environmental conditions, or emerging social and cultural forces.