Prof. Joe McFadden is a member of a collaborative research team that has been awarded a grant of $299,429 (October 2009 to February 2012) from the National Science Foundation and the U.S.D.A. Forest Service. The team will study water management and water consumption associated with the urban forest and outdoor landscaping in the city of Los Angeles. The investigators’ goal is to integrate ecohydrology into a comprehensive understanding of both ecosystem services and disservices, and their interactions with the human dimensions of institutional management and organizational structure in the broader Los Angeles region. McFadden, who joined the Department last year, said “For the past few years my research has been focused on urban areas in the central U.S., and I’m excited to start a new project in the biggest city in California.” The collaborators on the project are from UCLA (lead institution), UC Irvine, UC Riverside, Arizona State University, and the Forest Service. Their successful proposal was one of 16 awarded out of 73 submitted nationwide.
The project was funded through the NSF Urban Long-Term Research Areas Exploratory (ULTRA-Ex) Awards competition. The ULTRA-Ex program is intended to provide a foundation for the establishment of several new long-term ecological research (LTER) sites in U.S. cities. UCSB is the lead institution for two existing LTER sites, the Santa Barbara Coastal (SBC) site and the Moorea Coral Reef (MCR) site in French Polynesia, both of which involve Geography faculty members. McFadden said, “I expect there will be interesting opportunities to link our L.A. study to research at the existing LTER sites–for example, the Santa Barbara Channel LTER is strongly affected by everything that happens on the coast, which is dominated by urban land use. Soon, we should be able to start connecting the pieces to understand how natural and urban ecosystems interact at much larger scales than we do today.”
