How Population Density, Socio-Economic Status & Lifestyle Affect Land Use/Cover: Testing the Homogenization Hypothesis in Six U.S. Metro Areas

Urban ecosystems present a difficult challenge to environmental scientists and managers. These highly managed systems have potentially great impact on air and water quality and human well-being, but the diversity of natural and human drivers would seem a priori to complicate their analysis and management. Yet there is also a countervailing conventional wisdom that residential landscapes are becoming increasingly homogeneous in land use, land cover, and ecological function. This NSF MACRO-BIO project tests the overarching hypothesis that maintenance of similar management practices among cities leads to homogenization in ecological structure and functions relevant to ecosystem carbon and nitrogen dynamics, with potential continental -scale implications. The specific results reported in this poster include statistical tests of the extent to which residential land use and land cover are associated with differing levels of three variables selected to represent three important dimensions of human-environment interactions: population density, socio-economic status, and lifestyle. Results are presented from a multivariate analysis of an October 2011 telephone survey that generated ~9500 household-level responses to approximately 50 questions; these responses are roughly evenly split among six U.S. metro areas: Boston, Baltimore, Miami, Minneapolis, Phoenix, and Los Angeles.