 |
 |
| Home | Poster Submission | Agenda | Posters | Archives | Contacts |
|
Assessing the benefits of green infrastructure: The dynamics of landscape decision, built morphology, and ecosystem services Carol Wessman(1), Brian Muller(2), Mahda Bagher(2), Brian Buma(1), Travis Flohr(2), Mehdi Heris(2), (1) CIRES and EBIO, (2) CU Planning and Design Urban natural landscapes provide services that may address a variety of environmental and urban planning needs, including improvement of hydrological systems, disaster risk mitigation, mitigation of climate change effects, amelioration of heat islands and carbon sequestration. Green infrastructure is considered a strategy for adapting to climate change and environmental stresses, however its benefits have not been evaluated systematically as an integrated analysis of landscape morphologies and ecosystem services. We are exploring the drivers and benefits of green infrastructure investment at local and regional scales using remote sensing and spatial data in an emerging mega-region, the Colorado Front Range, which extends across two states from Pueblo, Colorado to Laramie, Wyoming. We focus on two outcomes of landscape decisions: urban phenology and the thermal landscape. This stage of the project has two components. First, we characterize both the built and un-built components of landscape morphologies at sample sites (using high detail data) and across the region (using moderate resolution data). Second, we evaluate patterns of phenology (temporal variation in MODIS NDVI), thermal effects (ASTER), and land use/land cover within the framework of these morphologies. These results support green infrastructure policy as an adaptive strategy to conditions of climate change and resource scarcity. |
