The Center for Urban Resilience (CURes) is dedicated to serving urban communities with a suite of research, education, restorative justice and urban planning programs designed to improve quality of life for residents, especially for those in underserved neighborhoods. All CURes papers and reports are available for download through our Center for Urban Resilience Virtual Hub.
CURes is proud share three new research papers that were published within the span of one week! The papers detail research examining: environmental stewardship mapping and assessment, definitions of environmental stewardship, and urban coyote management challenges.
Leveraging Environmental Stewardship Mapping and Assessment Research as a Relational Process for Ecology with Cities
Authored by Bemmy Jennifer Maharramli and Michele Romolini
Published in Frontiers in Sustainable Cities
We examined a university-led research effort on urban environmental stewardship in Los Angeles (LA), USA. A university urban research center conducted an environmental Stewardship Mapping and Assessment Project (STEW-MAP) in Los Angeles County, which draws upon network analysis and GIS to better understand sustainability relationships, opportunities, and gaps. STEW-MAP is intended to be both a research study examining stewardship organizations across sectors, scales, jurisdictions and geographic space, as well as an application providing tools to facilitate collaborative environmental stewardship.
Expanding Current Definitions of Environmental Stewardship Through Organizational Mission Statement Analysis
Authored by Alyssa S. Thomas and Michele Romolini
Published in AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment
This study compared the mission statements of environmental stewardship groups in the Los Angeles River Watershed to previously proposed definitions and frameworks of organizational environmental stewardship to see how well they were reflected.
They found that the missions statements do not always reflect the existing concepts surrounding environmental stewardships. They also saw that a more comprehensive definition of environmental stewardship may be needed to bridge the gap between research and practice. Results show that, although often consistent, the mission statements do not always reflect existing concepts around environmental stewardship. Additionally, environmental stewardship is not always explicit in the mission statements of organizations that are known to conduct these activities.
A Collaborative Social-Ecological Research Approach to Inform & Address Urban Coyote Management Challenges
Authored by Melinda J. Weaver, Anna Monterastelli, Eric G. Strauss, and Michele Romolini
Published in Cities and the Environment (CATE)
Because of rare but high-profile instances of human-coyote conflict, urban coyotes are often perceived only as a nuisance, or even dangerous, to human populations and their domestic animals. This tension between urban wildlife and communities can result in policy and management decisions that are not effective or beneficial to either population. This report describes one social-ecological research and outreach approach that has been implemented in two cities in Southern California: Long Beach and Culver City, CA.
Components of these projects include: identifying coyote movement patterns through motion activated cameras; examining coyote diets through analysis of scat samples; gathering information about resident knowledge and behavior through public surveys; and developing formal and informal curricula to be used in public education and outreach programming.