Uneven Access and Underuse of Ecological Amenities in Urban Parks of the R&amp;#237;o Piedras Watershed

Santiago, Luis; Ortiz, Julio C. Verdejo; Santiago-Bartolomei, Raúl; Meléndez‐Ackerman, Elvia J.; García-Montiel, Diana C.

doi:10.5751/es-06180-190126

Cited by 16 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 26 publications

(30 reference statements)

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“…For land use planning in San Juan, our data products can serve to (1) identify patches of vegetation that can be converted to vegetable gardens, which is important for low income neighborhoods (Santiago et al. ), (2) improve precipitation runoff and flood models that require high‐resolution vegetation cover data, and (3) evaluate the status of riparian vegetation, which is important for maintaining water quality in the city.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Martinuzzi

Ramos‐González

Muñoz‐Erickson

et al. 2018

Ecological Applications

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Fine-scale information about urban vegetation and social-ecological relationships is crucial to inform both urban planning and ecological research, and high spatial resolution imagery is a valuable tool for assessing urban areas. However, urban ecology and remote sensing have largely focused on cities in temperate zones. Our goal was to characterize urban vegetation cover with sub-meter (<1 m) resolution aerial imagery, and identify social-ecological relationships of urban vegetation patterns in a tropical city, the San Juan Metropolitan Area, Puerto Rico. Our specific objectives were to (1) map vegetation cover using sub-meter spatial resolution (0.3-m) imagery, (2) quantify the amount of residential and non-residential vegetation, and (3) investigate the relationship between patterns of urban vegetation vs. socioeconomic and environmental factors. We found that 61% of the San Juan Metropolitan Area was green and that our combination of high spatial resolution imagery and object-based classification was highly successful for extracting vegetation cover in a moist tropical city (97% accuracy). In addition, simple spatial pattern analysis allowed us to separate residential from non-residential vegetation with 76% accuracy, and patterns of residential and non-residential vegetation varied greatly across the city. Both socioeconomic (e.g., population density, building age, detached homes) and environmental variables (e.g., topography) were important in explaining variations in vegetation cover in our spatial regression models. However, important socioeconomic drivers found in cities in temperate zones, such as income and home value, were not important in San Juan. Climatic and cultural differences between tropical and temperate cities may result in different social-ecological relationships. Our study provides novel information for local land use planners, highlights the value of high spatial resolution remote sensing data to advance ecological research and urban planning in tropical cities, and emphasizes the need for more studies in tropical cities.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Martinuzzi

Ramos‐González

Muñoz‐Erickson

et al. 2018

Ecological Applications

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“…We know that the potential for trade-offs between GI services is an issue of concern in natural resource management as a factor that may detract from GI goals [70,71]. Perceptions of vegetation in public spaces as a dis-amenity (or dis-service) because of security and maintenance concerns has been shown to occur within RPWS [72]. Of significance here is the fact that those residents with more formal education also expressed greater likelihood to make changes in their yards.…”

Section: What Are the Drivers Of Yard Structure And Management In Sanmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…La Sierra, with the highest frequency of residents who do yard planting, hosts a coalition of neighborhoods that is engaged in the active planting of trees along the Arboretum of Cupey, an urban riparian forest that was incorporated into the San Juan Ecological Corridor, a protected urban forest under Law 206 of 2003 [79]. We also know from past work that these riparian corridors have had positive effects on housing prices within RPWS [72]. San Patricio and La Sierra showed lower frequencies of households with provisioning yard services (Figure 4).…”

Section: What Are the Drivers Of Yard Structure And Management In Sanmentioning

confidence: 99%

Synthesis of Household Yard Area Dynamics in the City of San Juan Using Multi-Scalar Social-Ecological Perspectives

et al. 2016

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Urban sustainability discourse promotes the increased use of green infrastructure (GI) because of its contribution of important ecosystem services to city dwellers. Under this vision, all urban green spaces, including those at the household scale, are valued for their potential contributions to a city's social-ecological functioning and associated benefits for human well-being. Understanding how urban residential green spaces have evolved can help improve sustainable urban planning and design, but it requires examining urban processes occurring at multiple scales. The interaction between social structures and ecological structures within the subtropical city of San Juan, the capital and the largest city of Puerto Rico, has been an important focus of study of the San Juan ULTRA (Urban Long-Term Research Area) network, advancing understanding of the city's vulnerabilities and potential adaptive capacity. Here we provide a synthesis of several social-ecological processes driving residential yard dynamics in the city of San Juan, Puerto Rico, through the evaluation of empirical findings related to yard management decisions, yard area, and yard services. We emphasize the role of factors occurring at the household scale. Results are discussed within the context of shrinking cities using an integrated, multi-scalar, social-ecological systems framework, and consider the implications of household green infrastructure for advancing urban sustainability theory.

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“…Ramos- Santiago et al (2014) studied three neighborhoods and found that those at a lower socioeconomic scale, i.e., Puerto Nuevo and Caparra Terrace, respectively lost at a minimum 60% and 55% of private green area and 85% and 79% of their public planting strip areas, whereas University Gardens with a higher socioeconomic level lost 36% of private green areas and 23% of public planting strip areas. All three communities had been planned communities that were subject to dramatic land cover changes as they aged, but one maintained more green infrastructure than the others, commensurate with socioeconomic level.…”

Section: Interaction Between People and Green Infrastructurementioning

confidence: 99%

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

Muñoz‐Erickson¹,

Lugo²,

Quintero³

2014

E&S

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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.

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Uneven Access and Underuse of Ecological Amenities in Urban Parks of the Río Piedras Watershed

Cited by 16 publications

References 26 publications

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

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

Synthesis of Household Yard Area Dynamics in the City of San Juan Using Multi-Scalar Social-Ecological Perspectives

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

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