Greenspace moderates heat avoidance in physical activity during extreme heat: Evidence from Strava data in Houston, Texas

Journal of Transport & Health · 2025-05-01 · 1 citations

Urban Climate Adaptation and REsilience (U-CARE) in Texas: Insights from Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Applied Spatial Analysis and Policy · 2025-05-07 · 3 citations

Right tree, right place for whom? Environmental justice and practices of urban forest assessment

Local Environment · 2023 · 20 citations

• Political Science
• Environmental resource management
• Business

Ecosystem services from urban trees and other green amenities form the basis for sweeping urban greening initiatives that can paradoxically worsen socio-ecological inequalities in cities. Previous research demonstrating distributive injustices like gentrification arising from urban greening have led to new efforts to integrate an environmental justice lens into urban ecosystem service planning and management. However, data-driven practices of technocratic expertise, like those that draw on ecosystem service quantification and valuation, may themselves become sites where procedural injustice emerges. This paper examines procedural justice in urban tree canopy assessments, a genre of technical document prepared for expert audiences that typically describes the urban tree canopy through the lens of ecosystem service valuation. Drawing on 30 assessments from U.S. cities, our analysis highlights how assessments deploy a scalar politics of tree value that evades questions of greenspace equity and helps forge an expert consensus around market-oriented sustainability before a management plan is written. We show how forestry principles of “right tree, right place” combine with boundary work around tree risk to empower expert-led management and deprioritize civic involvement. While injustice can emerge through the practices of technocratic expertise that undergird management for ecosystem services, we caution against wholesale rejection of data-driven decision-making and point towards ways to selectively embrace data to enable new forms of civic involvement. We conclude by calling for urban forest assessments that shift the focus towards the relationships between trees and people along with a broader integration of procedural justice into processes of urban ecosystem service management.

Greenness and equity: Complex connections between intra-neighborhood contexts and residential tree planting implementation

Environment International · 2023 · 24 citations

• Political Science
• Geography
• Socioeconomics

Associations between neighborhood greenness and socioeconomic status (SES) are established, yet intra-neighborhood context and SES-related barriers to tree planting remain unclear. Large-scale tree planting implementation efforts are increasingly common and can improve human health, strengthen climate adaptation, and ameliorate environmental inequities. Yet, these efforts may be ineffective without in-depth understanding of local SES inequities and barriers to residential planting. We recruited 636 residents within and surrounding the Oakdale Neighborhood of Louisville, Kentucky, USA, and evaluated associations of individual and neighborhood-level sociodemographic indicators with greenness levels at multiple scales. We offered no-cost residential tree planting and maintenance to residents within a subsection of the neighborhood and examined associations of these sociodemographic indicators plus baseline greenness levels with tree planting adoption among 215 eligible participants. We observed positive associations of income with Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and leaf area index (LAI) within all radii around homes, and within yards of residents, that varied in strength. There were stronger associations of income with NDVI in front yards but LAI in back yards. Among Participants of Color, associations between income and NDVI were stronger than with Whites and exhibited no association with LAI. Tree planting uptake was not associated with income, education, race, nor employment status, but was positively associated with lot size, home value, lower population density, and area greenness. Our findings reveal significant complexity of intra-neighborhood associations between SES and greenness that could help shape future research and equitable greening implementation. Results show that previously documented links between SES and greenspace at large scales extend to residents' yards, highlighting opportunities to redress greenness inequities on private property. Our analysis found that uptake of no-cost residential planting and maintenance was nearly equal across SES groups but did not redress greenness inequity. To inform equitable greening, further research is needed to evaluate culture, norms, perceptions, and values affecting tree planting acceptance among low-SES residents.

An antiracist, anticolonial agenda for urban greening and conservation

Conservation Letters · 2022 · 38 citations

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Political Science

Abstract Productive discourse regarding the role of racism and colonialism in conservation is growing but still limited. Inadequate recognition of these powerful forces has significantly impeded socially just conservation efforts. This paper integrates multiple disciplinary perspectives to discuss historical conservation practices in the United States and abroad to reveal challenges with moving beyond traditional approaches to conservation that perpetuate systemic racism and colonialism. Using urban greening (e.g., tree planting) in the United States as an example, we show how these challenges manifest as White ideals of nature, power disparities, and displacement and exclusion. We then put forth an agenda for antiracist, anticolonial urban conservation and urban greening. This agenda uses the tripartite environmental justice framework (i.e., distributional, recognition, and procedural justice) as a starting point, integrating and adapting more critical views of contemporary environmental justice to highlight specific policies and practices that can be applied to many conservation problems.

Sociohydrological Impacts of Water Conservation Under Anthropogenic Drought in Austin, TX (USA)

Water Resources Research · 2018-03-15 · 52 citations

Abstract Municipal water providers increasingly respond to drought by implementing outdoor water use restrictions to reduce urban water withdrawals and maintain water availability. However, restricting urban outdoor water use to support watershed‐scale drought resilience may generate unanticipated cross‐scale interactions, for example, by altering drought response and recovery in urban vegetation or urban streamflow. Despite this, urban water conservation is rarely conceptualized or modeled as endogenous to the water cycle. Here we investigate cross‐scale interactions among urban water conservation and water availability, water use, and sociohydrological response in Austin, TX (USA) during a recent anthropogenic (human‐influenced) drought. Multiscalar statistical analyses demonstrated that outdoor water conservation for reservoir management at the municipal scale produced responses that can cascade both “upward” from the city to the watershed (e.g., decoupling streamflow patterns upstream and downstream of Austin at the watershed scale) and “downward” to exert heterogeneous effects within the city (e.g., redistributing water along a socioeconomic gradient at submunicipal scales, with effects on terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems). We suggest that adapting to anthropogenic drought through irrigation curtailment requires sustained engagement between hydrology and social sciences to integrate socioeconomic status and political feedbacks within and among irrigator groups into the water cycle. Findings from this cross‐disciplinary study highlight the importance of a multiscalar and spatially explicit perspectives in urban sociohydrology research to uncover how water conservation as adaptation to anthropogenic drought links hydrological processes with issues of socioeconomic inequality and spatiotemporal scale in the Anthropocene.

Socio-environmental drought response in a mixed urban-agricultural setting: synthesizing biophysical and governance responses in the Platte River Watershed, Nebraska, USA

Ecology and Society · 2017-01-01 · 25 citations

Zipper, S. C., K. Helm Smith, B. Breyer, J. Qiu, A. Kung, and D. Herrmann. 2017. Socio-environmental drought response in a mixed urban-agricultural setting: synthesizing biophysical and governance responses in the Platte River Watershed, Nebraska, USA. Ecology and Society 22(4):39. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-09549-220439

Urban water consumption and weather variation in the Portland, Oregon metropolitan area

Urban Climate · 2014-05-29 · 27 citations

Food mirages: Geographic and economic barriers to healthful food access in Portland, Oregon

Health & Place · 2013-08-26 · 149 citations

Land-use, temperature, and single-family residential water use patterns in Portland, Oregon and Phoenix, Arizona

Applied Geography · 2012-07-20 · 83 citations