Meredith Steele's paper on the characteristics of urban water bodies in US cities has been published in this month's issue of Ecological Applications.  Based on analysis of over 1 million water bodies in 100 US cities, we show that urban water bodies exhibit less variation in size than their counterparts in undeveloped lands, are generally less connected to surface channel networks, and that despite the presence of many unusually shaped water bodies in urban lands, they also tend to be more simply shaped.  These patterns have implications for how urban water bodies interact with and respond to upland processes and act as habitat for biota.  

We also found that city size influences whether or not the types of water bodies in cities are similar to those in surrounding undeveloped lands.  In large cities, wetlands, ponds, and other shallow water bodies are present in about the same proportion as in their surroundings.  But in smaller cities, these water bodies are generally absent.  This pattern suggests that the processes that shape urban hydrography change as cities grow: initially, cities may be located in relatively dry land where building is easier, but as the urban footprint expands, alteration of water bodies may become more prevalent. What we don't know is how past and present protections for aquatic habitats may influence these patterns.  

Our Urban Homogenization group has a new paper out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  Led by Colin Polsky at Clark University, the paper shows that lawn care practices vary both among cities and among different life stages, development densities, and socio-economic groups within cities.  The major conceptual contributions of the paper are to introduce the idea of scale to our previous work on homogenization, and to demonstrate that lawn care practices may be very heterogeneous, even if the biophysical structure of residential landscapes is homogenized by urbanization.

We have two new papers that just came out as part of a special issue of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment on continental scale ecology.  

The first paper (Heffernan et al. 2014; Macrosystems Ecology: Understanding Ecological Pattern and Processes at Continental Scales) proposes a framework for incorporating a systems perspective more completely into the study of broad-scale ecological phenomena.  This means thinking about processes like feedbacks between vegetation and climate, long-distance connections between ecosystems, and ways in which broad- and fine-scale phenomena influence one another.  We think that this broad scale systems perspective ('Macrosystems Ecology') is going to be essential for predicting the effects of many different anthropogenic changes that have causes and consequences at the scale of whole regions and continents.  One challenge in writing this paper is that ecologists and others have been thinking about regions and continents for a long time, in sub-disciplines like biogeography and related fields like climate science.  We argue that two things are changing - 1) across these fields, we are incorporating more and more process into that understanding (which is made easier through data sets that have a fine resolution but cover broad extents); and 2) that we are able to make more and more connections across different types of phenomena (e.g., linking climate change, population genetics, and habitat loss; or understanding the diverse ecological consequences of bark beetle outbreaks).  We also deal with the question of 'What is distinct about macrosystems?'  Again, part of the challenge is that many ecological theories are supposed to apply to all scales, so lots of characteristics of macrosystems are likely to fit within such theory.  One the other hand, some may not; one way (the only way?) to figure out whether macrosystems are distinct is to study regions and continents as systems through the lens of such theory.  There is already some neat work that tries to do this, and hopefully lots more on the way!

The second paper (Groffman et al. 2014; Ecological homogenization of urban USA) is an overview of our 'Urban Homogenization' project, and presents some of the preliminary data that led us to this work in the first place. This is the project that includes Meredith Steele's work on surface water features in cities.