Emerging synthesis themes from the study of social-ecological systems of a tropical city

Abstract

ABSTRACT. The synthesis of the contributions in this special issue about the tropical city of San Juan has resulted in five themes. First, the city is subject to multiple vulnerabilities, but socioeconomic factors and education level affect the perception of citizens to those vulnerabilities, even in the face of imminent threat. Second, in light of the social-ecological conditions of the city, how its citizens and institutions deal with knowledge to respond to vulnerabilities becomes critical to the adaptive capacity of the city. Third, the relationship between socioeconomic factors and green cover, which in 2002 covered 42% of the city, is not what has been reported for other temperate zone cities. In San Juan, neighborhoods with households of high socioeconomic level were not necessarily associated with greater green cover. However, in adjacent neighborhoods within the densely populated zones of the city, households of high socioeconomic level did preserve green cover better than households in lower socioeconomic-level neighborhoods. Fourth, tropical conditions such as climate may explain some of the unique aspects of the social-ecological system of San Juan. The most obvious is the exuberance of tropical biota in the city that not only forms novel species assemblages but also provides many ecological services, including food production for up to 60% of the members of particular neighborhoods. Ecosystem resilience is particularly high in aquatic and terrestrial ecological systems in San Juan. Fifth, it appears that the emergence of novel systems in the city represent adaptive responses to the social end ecological conditions in the city. We conclude that the study of a tropical city provides contrast to the prevailing literature on temperate and boreal cities and expands the suite of behaviors of urban social-ecological systems, thus advancing the dialogue on the functioning of cities in light of environmental change.

Attitudes toward Residential Trees and Awareness of Tree Services and Disservices in a Tropical City

“…We collected data through household and yard surveys via a convenient-based recruitment at six permanent monitoring locations within the Río Piedras Watershed (RPWS) based on the San Juan Urban Long-Term Research Area (ULTRA) Collaborative Network stratified sampling scheme [31,34,86,98]. The six sites have been studied to address a variety of social-ecological questions at residential scales since 2011 [26,30,31,82,86,98,99] and lie across a rural-urban and elevation gradient of grey coverage (Table 1). At each site a circular buffer zone of 1 km radius was overlaid on aerial photos of San Juan and a street vector file of access roads using ArcGIS v. 9.3 software [100].…”

“…In addition, private yards can improve human health and well-being by providing physical and psychological benefits, facilitating connections with other people and with nature [16], and by providing services that go beyond their utilitarian value (e.g., emotional, physiological, spiritual) [24][25][26][27]. Private yards are managed green spaces, and as such, their condition and dynamics will be greatly influenced by both social and ecological drivers, warranting an integrated multi-scalar, social-ecological approach to develop understanding of these systems [17,[28][29][30][31][32]. In that regard, many studies emphasize that anthropogenic factors could dominate over non-anthropogenic ones in determining the characteristics of green infrastructure elements at the residential scale [17,29,33,34].…”

Characterization of ten extreme disturbance events in the context of social and ecological systems

“…Fig. 11 Heuristic schematic of the evolution of solutions to flooding in a social ecological system (from Muñoz-Erickson et al 2014). The basic social ecological configuration is subjected to extreme flooding events (left side of the diagram).…”

Vegetation cover in relation to socioeconomic factors in a tropical city assessed from sub‐meter resolution imagery

“…), and a strong legacy of Spanish city planning (Muñoz‐Erickson et al. ). In general, our findings highlight the need to be cautious when extrapolating results across climates and cultural settings.…”