Project
Temporal and spatial drivers of Canadian urban forestsUrban landscapes are a complex combination of natural, physical, social, and built elements, resulting in extremely fine-scale heterogeneity. Within this context, urban nature provides benefits to humans not received from built elements, improving urban residents’ overall well-being, happiness, mortality rates, and more. Ensuring equitable distribution of urban nature’s benefits requires understanding mechanisms that produce inequalities using empirical ecological data, grounded in the historical context and social fabric of cities. Ecosystem service capacity, or the total potential of an ecosystem to provide a certain service, provides a framework that can be understood by various stakeholders and addressed at multiple scales. Thus, managing urban nature for production and delivery of ecosystem services is a common and potentially effective and equity-based municipal goal. Regulating ecosystem services, defined as benefits that are provided through the regulation of the ecosystem, are particularly critical when managing cities because they often must be produced in situ. Urban forests in particular provide many regulating services that are critical to the well-being of urban residents. The capacity of the urban landscape to deliver ecosystem services is spatially and temporally heterogeneous, driven by anthropogenic and natural factors. Thus, understanding the variation and distribution of urban ecosystem service capacity requires a multi-scale, spatiotemporal approach. My PhD takes a spatiotemporal approach to investigating the processes that influence urban forest characteristics and regulating ecosystem service capacity in Canadian cities. I take a multi-service, multi-city, spatiotemporal approach which will contribute to theoretical and applied understanding of the ecology underlying urban ecosystem services, while incorporating the context, history, and social aspects of cities. Critically, some factors that impact ecosystem services, such as past environmental racism, are set by history and thus irrevocable. However, clearly defining common and distinct current drivers of, and legacy effects on, urban forest ecosystem services will help us shape future urban landscapes to more equitably serve all residents.
Keywords
ecosystem services, urban forest, landscape ecology, spatiotemporal heterogeneity, cross-city, legacy effectsPublications
1- Quantity–quality trade‐offs revealed using a multiscale test of herbivore resource selection on elemental landscapesBalluffi‐Fry, Juliana, Shawn J. Leroux, Yolanda F. Wiersma, Travis R. Heckford, Matteo Rizzuto, Isabella C. Richmond, Eric Vander Wal
2020 Ecology and Evolution
2- Integrating plant stoichiometry and feeding experiments: state-dependent forage choice and its implications on body mass
Balluffi-Fry, Juliana, Shawn J. Leroux, Yolanda F. Wiersma, Isabella C. Richmond, Travis R. Heckford, Matteo Rizzuto, Joanie L. Kennah, Eric Vander Wal
2021 Oecologia
3- Forage stoichiometry predicts the home range size of a small terrestrial herbivore
Rizzuto, Matteo, Shawn J. Leroux, Eric Vander Wal, Isabella C. Richmond, Travis R. Heckford, Juliana Balluffi-Fry, Yolanda F. Wiersma
2021 Oecologia
4- Plants, water quality and land cover as drivers of Odonata assemblages in urban ponds
Perron, Mary Ann C., Isabella C. Richmond, Frances R. Pick
2021 Science of The Total Environment
5- Individual snowshoe hares manage risk differently: integrating stoichiometric distribution models and foraging ecology
Richmond, Isabella C, Juliana Balluffi-Fry, Eric Vander Wal, Shawn J Leroux, Matteo Rizzuto, Travis R Heckford, Joanie L Kennah, Gabrielle R Riefesel, Yolanda F Wiersma,
2022 Journal of Mammalogy
6- Spatially explicit correlates of plant functional traits inform landscape patterns of resource quality
Heckford, Travis R., Shawn J. Leroux, Eric Vander Wal, Matteo Rizzuto, Juliana Balluffi-Fry, Isabella C. Richmond, Yolanda F. Wiersma
2021 Landscape Ecology
7- Temporal variation and its drivers in the elemental traits of four boreal plant species
Richmond, Isabella C, Shawn J Leroux, Travis R Heckford, Eric Vander Wal, Matteo Rizzuto, Juliana Balluffi-Fry, Joanie L Kennah, Yolanda F Wiersma,
2021 Journal of Plant Ecology
8- A case for beta regression in the natural sciences
Geissinger, Emilie A., Celyn L. L. Khoo, Isabella C. Richmond, Sally J. M. Faulkner, David C. Schneider
2022 Ecosphere
