Site Poster: CAP LTER – Urban Sustainability in the Dynamic Environment of Central Arizona

The Central Arizona–Phoenix (CAP) LTER Program is based in the central Arizona region and focuses on the greater Phoenix metropolitan area and surrounding Sonoran Desert. As one of the largest and fastest-growing cities in the U.S., Phoenix is an excellent location for urban ecological research. Since its founding shortly after the Civil War and, in part, since settlement of the area by native Hohokam in the mid-15^th century, urbanization has brought massive changes in the hydrologic and transportation infrastructure and other designed features of the built environment, as well as importation of non-native species, a “riparianization” of desert vegetation ecosystems, and altered climate due to the urban heat island effect, among many others. These structural alterations of the native desert environment along with demographic, economic, and societal shifts experienced among the many municipalities of the region contribute to a complex, dynamic, and ever-changing environment. Accordingly, CAP’s central question reflects this dynamism and the critical importance of cities in an urbanizing world, asking: How do the services provided by evolving urban ecosystems affect human outcomes and behavior, and how does human action (response) alter patterns of ecosystem structure and function and, ultimately, urban sustainability, in a dynamic environment?

Research at CAP draws from many disciplines including the social, biological, physical, and engineering sciences. CAP’s interdisciplinary research is integrated with a conceptual framework that links the social and ecological spheres of urban social-ecological systems via ecosystem services and via the press-pulse of human management decisions and natural disturbances. CAP contributes to scientific understanding by developing and testing theories of social-ecological systems in urban ecosystems using a place-based, transdisciplinary approach.  CAP scientists have worked throughout its 15 year history toward developing an integrative, synthetic science that brings several disciplinary perspectives together to examine problems and, ultimately, to pose sustainable solutions to those problems. Here we present examples of ongoing initiatives from our four integrative research areas: Climate, Ecosystems and People; Water Dynamics in a Desert City; Biogeochemical Patterns, Processes, and Human Outcomes; and Human Decisions and Biodiversity.