ASLA 2006 Professional Awards

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	Figure 1: Cover and Table of Contents This progress report summarizes the activities and accomplishments of the Landscape Change Integrated Research and Development Program (LCIP) from 1999-2003. By providing a diverse range of research information products including an award-winning website with interactive mapping capabilities, multi-media CDs, and more than 70 publications, the LCIP has been able to reach a broad spectrum of stakeholders, helping to guide designers, planners, managers, and policymakers in decisions about future growth and development of the region.




	Figure 2: A Process Model for Understanding Landscape Change This model was developed by Landscape Change program leaders to identify key questions for research on the patterns, drivers, and consequences of landscape change, and for evaluating strategies to shift the trajectory of change toward more sustainable futures. The model has not only helped guide the research program as a whole, but has also been successfully used to gather stakeholder input on focused studies for particular issues such as private forestland parcelization and development.




	Figure 3: Patterns of Landscape Change I: Housing Density New methods were developed for using US Census data to measure housing density change and identify different patterns of growth occurring across the Midwest region within a 50 year period (1940-1990). Housing growth clusters depicted by the various colors on the maps and chart show where slow, moderate, and rapid growth have taken place across the region and within the example Twin Cities metropolitan area; these clustering methods have been used to identify areas with high housing growth potential.




	Figure 4: Patterns of Landscape Change II: Land Cover New methods developed for merging disparate sets of remotely sensed land cover data allow detection of changes at a resolution of 1 kilometer with an accuracy rate of more than 90 percent. Applying this methodology across the study region, researchers found that the area of Midwestern forestland increased by 18.7 percent (about 12.5 million acres) and the area of urban lands increased by 23.4 percent (about 1.4 million acres). This improved information has put designers, planners, and managers in a better position to understand and deal with the ecological, economic, and social consequences of change.




	Figure 5: Drivers of Landscape Change I: Amenity Migration Amenity resources such as lakes and forests have always drawn visitors and seasonal homeowners, but new research has found that recent shifts in patterns of work make it easier than ever for people to make these special places their permanent home. A case study of homeowners in Walworth County in southern Wisconsin revealed that the county’s lake and recreational resources were strong factors in home purchase decisions and that although a significant percentage called Chicago their permanent home, they spent a large portion of their time at their Walworth County second home and many planned to become permanent residents in the future. These findings on amenity driven population shifts has helped planners and policymakers to anticipate and guide future development.

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RESEARCH AWARD OF HONOR

From Landscapes to Lots: Understanding and Managing Midwestern Landscape Change
Paul H. Gobster, Ph.D., ASLA and Robert G. Haight, Ph.D, Science
Co-Leaders, USDA Forest Service, North Central Research Station, St. Paul, Minnesota


	"Extremely strong methodology. Very important work!" — 2006 Professional Awards Jury Comments

Problem Researched
From the fringes of its urban areas to its extensive northern and southern forests, critical natural landscapes across the Midwestern US are becoming increasingly transformed by development. Sometimes abrupt and sometimes subtle, these landscape changes are having unintended consequences on the valued natural character of the region. As a result, people who look to the natural landscapes of the region for their livelihood and their leisure are finding the very characteristics and experiences they desire are changing rapidly or disappearing altogether. Changes caused by landscape fragmentation and urban sprawl can result in reduced quantity or quality of resources, decreased access, and higher costs. These impacts affect a wide range of commodity, environmental, recreational, community, and governmental interests, and have significant implications for landscape design, planning, management, and policy.

A solid program of research is needed in order to guide landscape change and make appropriate decisions about the future. This has been a key message of the ongoing Landscape Architecture Foundation’s Futures Initiative, which has also underscored the need for landscape architects to collaborate with others in the natural and social sciences and design professions to address complex issues relating to landscape change. It is in this same spirit that the Landscape Change Integrated Research and Development Program (LCIP) was initiated. In 1999 a group of federal agency researchers joined together across disciplinary lines in a coordinated effort to examine critical questions related to landscape change across a 7-state region of the Midwest. Led by a landscape architect and an environmental economist, our team has gone on to build a body of applied research relevant to stakeholder needs. Although the program continues to grow and evolve, this data summary focuses on work accomplished during the first five years (1999-2003) as summarized in the From Landscapes to Lots publication (Figure 1).

Relationships Investigated
To identify key questions for research, we developed a process model for understanding landscape change (Figure 2). This model views landscape change as a process where patterns of change result from one or more driving forces of social, economic, or technological origin. These changes may have effects on people and ecosystems, sometimes for the better, but the changes that concern most resource-oriented stakeholders are often expressed as negative impacts. As depicted by the looped model, strategies undertaken to address the consequences of change feed back into the model, resulting in new landscape patterns and altering the trajectory of the change process. Four main questions resulted from this modeling process, each with a number of sub-questions responding to stakeholder needs:

How is the landscape changing? What are the critical patterns of landscape change? Where are today’s hotspots of change and how can we predict future ones?
What drives landscape change? What forces drive landscape change? How do such drivers as landscape attractiveness work in concert with technological change and the aging population? Do people's perceptions of changing landscapes drive further change?
What are the consequences of landscape change for people and ecosystems? How does the quality of people’s lives change? How are plant and wildlife communities impacted? How resilient is the transformed landscape, and how well does it serve societal and ecological needs?
What do we do about it? Growth management tools abound, but how well do they work? How can communities benefit economically without losing local character and quality of life? How do we mobilize new landowners to collectively maintain healthy landscapes? In what capacities can landscape architects and others work most effectively?

Methods of Inquiry Used
Our research program began with meetings and discussion among internal and external stakeholders to identify priority projects within each of the four question areas. Because the LCIP was conceived of as an integrated research program, some projects brought multiple talents to bear on broad research questions. Other projects had a more narrowly focused target, and integration was achieved by synthesizing study findings through various communication products. In both cases, an LCIP competitive funding source supplied an initial incentive for collaboration between research participants, many of whom came together for the first time to address common problems. This seed money provided a catalyst to leverage additional research funds, and in the program’s first five years $.56 million in dedicated program funding was matched by $3.4 million in contributing funds by federal agency collaborators and another $2.5 million by cooperating public and private institutions for a total of more than $6.4 million for research.

Research methods for individual projects ran the range from analysis of county-level resource and demographic data to look at broad scale changes across the 7-state region over time to detailed bird nesting surveys and stakeholder focus groups to identify the impacts of change within critical populations or case study locations. While researchers were guided by quality control and peer review processes to maintain a high degree of scientific rigor in their work, they were also challenged by participating practitioners and administrators to answer the “So what?” questions and make their work useful and accessible to designers, planners, managers, and policy makers. Involvement from a number of landscape architectural researchers and those from other applied professions also helped to challenge the team’s work for relevancy and applicability.

Results of Research
The LCIP sponsored 91 studies over the period 1999-2003. While several of these projects are still in progress, the program to date has provided solid research information in each of the four question areas. Representative projects are described below and in the accompanying figures:

Highlights of Findings:

How is the landscape changing? Our research has helped identify the critical patterns and trends of changes in the Midwest region over recent decades. Detailed information on housing density and land cover (Figures 3 & 4), and county data on forest characteristics, plants and animals, and human demographics have been organized in a web-based atlas available to researchers, planners, and decision makers. Studies on other critical patterns such as ozone levels are helping to understand trends and linkages beyond the region.
What drives landscape change? Physical, biological, social, and economic factors combine in complex ways to draw people to locations within the region not only to visit, but also increasingly to build primary residences and second homes. This amenity migration has traditionally centered on the riparian areas within the region but is increasingly spreading to forest and agricultural areas of the urban and rural fringes (Figures 5 & 6).
What are the consequences of landscape change? Forest parcelization and low-density development patterns are affecting the people and ecosystems of the region. At the urban fringe, forest fragmentation is reducing songbird populations and the health of oak ecosystems. There also are concerns in more rural areas, such as economic impacts to the forest industry as increasing housing density results in fewer timber removals (Figure 7). Concerns about sprawl among metropolitan residents have increased across the Midwest region, with the perceived effects on environmental quality, farmland and open-space protection, traffic, and other problems varying in intensity from city to city (Figure 8).
What do we do about it? Strategies for avoiding, minimizing, or ameliorating the negative effects of landscape change include policies aimed at protecting open space by regulating land use, providing incentives to landowners and developers, and educating homeowners (Figure 9). The effectiveness of many open-space protection strategies has not been tested, but approaches that integrate multiple tools and authorities have the highest potential for succeeding. Understanding the goals of planners and residents can go far to achieve long-term, effective, and equitable guidelines for landscape change (Figure 10).

Impact: These findings are further summarized in the From Landscapes to Lots publication and in an accompanying website, and are detailed in more than 70 scientific articles published thus far. The following products exemplify the impact the LCIP is having:

A special double issue of Landscape and Urban Planning on the “Social aspects of landscape change” describes causes, consequences, and solutions relevant to better understanding the relationships between people and urbanizing landscapes. Seven of the issue’s 13 articles remain listed among the 25 most downloaded articles on the journal’s website.
Web-accessible regional maps of housing density change from 1940-2000. Methods originally developed for the LCIP have become indispensable to the federal National Fire Plan for identifying communities at risk of wildland fire and have been applied nationally.
An interactive element of the web-based atlas mentioned above lets users select from a list of city names to view hotspots of rapid land cover change and generate maps and data tables of land cover change for 1980-2000 for any user-defined area. This effort won a major federal agency award for putting research information into the hands of users.
A multimedia CD entitled Oak Wilt: People and Trees—A Community Approach to Management details Best Management Practices to halt the spread of Oak Wilt in urbanizing landscapes. The CDs have been widely distributed to landscape architects, developers, planners, urban foresters, and other key audiences.

Role of the Landscape Architect: Landscape architecture is prominently represented in LCIP efforts. In addition to the program’s co-leader, the LCIP has collaborated with 11 principal investigators from landscape architecture programs at eight universities. Across 15 different projects, this work demonstrates the contribution of landscape architectural perspectives to research in landscape change and illustrates the range of topics that constitute landscape architectural research. Example project titles include:

Aligning social and ecological drivers of urban landscape change;
Predicting scenic perception in a changing landscape;
Nature at the urban edge: Ecological-psychological values;
Community identities as visions for landscape change;
Conflict in interface forestry: Nature, science, and landscape change;
Integrating social values in landscape change assessments; and
Comparing perceptions of riparian function to assessed values and conditions: Management in a changing landscape.

Conclusions
The Landscape Change Integrated Research and Development Program has helped to build awareness and provide information and tools to designers, planners, managers, and policymakers for understanding and guiding development oriented landscape change in the Midwestern US. While the research program began as a largely regional effort, several of its products and findings have made an impact nationally and internationally. As an interdisciplinary collaboration, the LCIP has brought diverse talents together to address complex social and environmental issues that transcend disciplinary and professional boundaries. While landscape architecture has been viewed as an integral player in the mix from the start, as the program evolved participants have come to even more fully appreciate the value of landscape architectural research perspectives in understanding the dimensionality of problems and issues in landscape change.

Landscape architecture has an important role to play in landscape change research, but it is also the role of the profession to bring the fruits of this research into practice and policy for responsibly guiding future development of the landscape. Through initiatives such as the LCIP and LAF’s Futures Initiative, the linkages between research, practice, and policy can be strengthened.



Steering Committee: Thomas R. Crow, John F. Dwyer, Eric J. Gustafson, Robert Haack, Warren E. Heilman, Pamela Jakes, Dennis May, Frank R. Thompson, and J. Michael Vasievich. Principal Scientists: David Bengston (Ecological Economics), Joseph Charney (Meteorology), Thomas Crow (Landscape Ecology), John Dwyer (Urban Forestry), Paul Gobster (Landscape Architecture), Eric Gustafson (Landscape Ecology), Robert Haight (Forest Economics), Warren Heilman (Meteorology), Pam Jakes (Forestry), Jennifer Juzwik (Forest Pathology), Charles Michler (Forest Genetics), Robert Potts (Social Science), Thomas Schmidt (Forestry), Herbert Schroeder (Environmental Psychology), Stephanie Snyder (Operations Research), Susan Stewart (Recreation Research), Frank Thompson (Wildlife Ecology), Lynne Westphal (Urban Planning), Patrick Zollner (Landscape Ecology) Communications: Deb Dietzman, Group Leader, Sharon Hobrla, Information Technology Specialist



	Figure 6: Drivers of Landscape Change II: Homeowners’ and Developers’ Views of Nature The LCIP sponsored a series of studies to understand the motivations and values driving residential development at the urban fringe. Research in the Detroit and Chicago metropolitan areas have looked at factors influencing homebuyers’ preferences and choices and the impact of natural environments in their decision process. Developers play an important role in urbanization trends, and findings summarized on this chart have helped planners and policymakers better understand how to guide future growth.




	Figure 7: Consequences of Landscape Change I: Perceived Impacts of Urban Sprawl across Thirteen Midwestern Cities A quantitative analysis of newspapers in 13 Midwest metropolitan areas over the period 1995-2000 provides an efficient new approach to assessing trends in public attitudes, beliefs, and values about urban sprawl. The researchers found eight main concerns about urban sprawl, an overall increase in concerns over time, and substantial differences between different cities. These findings are providing insights into community impacts of sprawl and guidance for improving public policy.




	Figure 8: Consequences of Landscape Change II: Effects of Housing Density on Timber Harvesting In this study, researchers used forest inventory and US Census data to identify a key relationship between housing density and timber harvesting. Results showed that harvesting of several commercially important tree species effectively halts when housing densities exceed 20 units/km2 (and as low as 6 units/km2 for aspen), suggesting that traditional lifeways can be radically affected by even relatively low densities of new residential development. The challenge to forest planners and managers will be to balance new recreational and aesthetic values with longstanding ecological and economic ones.




	Figure 9: Response Strategies for Addressing Landscape Change I: Guidelines for Open-Space Neighborhoods on the Urban Fringe To understand public perceptions of open-space neighborhoods, researchers interviewed representatives of housing stakeholder groups in Metropolitan Detroit. Public officials viewed open-space neighborhoods favorably because they maintained natural areas and provide recreation opportunities, developers believed such neighborhoods spurred home sales, residents felt their quality of life was enhanced, and environmentalists believed such neighborhoods protected natural resources. The guidelines from this research summarized in the adjacent chart are being used to help balance new housing demand and protect natural resource values.




	Figure 10: Response Strategies for Addressing Landscape Change II: Goal Tradeoffs in Metropolitan Open Space Protection Researchers interviewed public and private land management groups in the Chicago metropolitan area to understand land protection goals, then developed an economic optimization model to assess how different goals might affect land acquisition decisions. As shown here in a test application of western Lake County, Illinois, by maximizing for a biodiversity goal one might select fewer, larger sites that are further away from where people live, while a model that equitably distributes sites near population centers results in selection of more but smaller sites. This model allows decision makers to systematically discover tradeoffs between their land protection goals.