Marina AlbertiUniversity of Washington Seattle | UW · Urban Design and Planning
Marina Alberti
Ph.D Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (113)
Significance
Ecoevolutionary feedbacks on contemporary timescales were hypothesized over half a century ago, but only recently has evidence begun to emerge. The role that human activity plays in such dynamics is still unclear. Through a metaanalysis of >1,600 phenotypic changes in species across regions and ecosystem types, we examine the evidence...
Emerging evidence that cities drive micro-evolution raises the question of whether rapid urbanization of Earth might impact ecosystems by causing systemic changes in functional traits that regulate urban ecosystems' productivity and stability. Intraspecific trait variation—variation in organisms' morphological, physiological or behavioural characte...
A great challenge for ecology in the coming decades is to understand the role humans play in eco-evolutionary dynamics. If, as emerging evidence shows, rapid evolutionary change affects ecosystem functioning and stability, current rapid environmental change and its evolutionary effects might have significant implications for ecological and human we...
Urban ecology is a field encompassing multiple disciplines and practical applications and has grown rapidly. However, the
field is heterogeneous as a global inquiry with multiple theoretical and conceptual frameworks, variable research approaches,
and a lack of coordination among multiple schools of thought and research foci. Here, we present an in...
Most of our global population and its CO2 emissions can be attributed to urban areas. The process of urbanization changes terrestrial carbon stocks and fluxes, which, in turn, impact ecosystem functions and atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Using the Seattle, WA, region as a case study, this paper explores the relationships between aboveground carbon...
Understanding the carbon dynamics of the transportation sector is necessary to mitigate global climate change. While urban scaling laws have been used to understand the impact of urban population size on carbon efficiency, the instability of these scaling relationships raises additional questions. Here, we examined the scaling of on-road transporta...
Urban evolutionary ecology is inherently interdisciplinary. Moreover, it is a field with global significance. However, bringing researchers and resources together across fields and countries is challenging. Therefore, an online collaborative research hub, where common methods and best practices are shared among scientists from diverse geographic, e...
Redlining—a racially discriminatory policy of systematic disinvestment established by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) in the 1930s and continued until the late 1960s—still influences the contemporary landscape of cities in the US. While the heterogeneous distribution of land surface temperature and tree canopy cover between neighborhoods w...
Urban evolutionary ecology is inherently interdisciplinary. Moreover, it is a field with global significance. However, bringing researchers and resources together across fields and countries is challenging. Therefore, an online collaborative research hub, where common methods and best practices are shared among scientists from diverse geographic, e...
There is a growing recognition that responding to climate change necessitates urban adaptation. We sketch a transdisciplinary research effort, arguing that actionable research on urban adaptation needs to recognize the nature of cities as social networks embedded in physical space. Given the pace, scale and socioeconomic outcomes of urbanization in...
Urban ecological studies have the potential to expand our understanding of socioecological systems beyond that of an individual city or region. Cross-comparative empirical work and synthesis are imperative to develop a general urban ecological theory. This can be achieved only if studies are replicable and generalizable. Transparency in methods rep...
Research on the evolutionary ecology of urban areas reveals how human-induced evolutionary changes affect biodiversity and essential ecosystem services. In a rapidly urbanizing world imposing many selective pressures, a time-sensitive goal is to identify the emergent issues and research priorities that affect the ecology and evolution of species wi...
Urbanization transforms environments in ways that alter biological evolution. We examined whether urban environmental change drives parallel evolution by sampling 110,019 white clover plants from 6169 populations in 160 cities globally. Plants were assayed for a Mendelian antiherbivore defense that also affects tolerance to abiotic stressors. Urban...
Urbanization transforms environments in ways that alter biological evolution. We examined whether urban environmental change drives parallel evolution by sampling 110,019 white clover plants from 6169 populations in 160 cities globally. Plants were assayed for a Mendelian antiherbivore defense that also affects tolerance to abiotic stressors. Urban...
A rationale for making biodiversity a central concern of urban design and planning, with case examples from the Pacific Rim.
Explicit characterisation of the complexity of urban landscapes is critical for understanding patterns of biodiversity and for detecting the underlying social and ecological processes that shape them. Urban environments exhibit variable heterogeneity and connectivity, influenced by different historical contingencies, that affect community assembly...
Sustainable urban systems (SUS) science is a new science integrating work across established and emerging disciplines, using diverse methods, and addressing issues at local, regional, national, and global scales. Advancing SUS requires the next generation of scholars and practitioners to excel at synthesis across disciplines and possess the skills...
We seek to model the coupled evolution of a civilization and its host planet through the era when energy harvesting by the civilization drives the planet into new and adverse climate states. In this way, we ask if triggering “Anthropocenes” of the kind humanity is experiencing might be a generic feature of planet−civilization evolution. This questi...
Record climate extremes are reducing urban liveability, compounding inequality, and threatening infrastructure. Adaptation measures that integrate technological, nature-based, and social solutions can provide multiple co-benefits to address complex socioecological issues in cities while increasing resilience to potential impacts. However, there rem...
During the last few decades, biologists have made remarkable progress in understanding the fundamental processes that shape life. But despite the unprecedented level of knowledge now available, large gaps still remain in our understanding of the complex interplay of eco-evolutionary mechanisms across scales of life. Rapidly changing environments on...
Many of the world’s major cities have implemented tree planting programs based on assumed environmental and social benefits of urban forests. Recent studies have increasingly tested these assumptions and provide empirical evidence for the contributions of tree planting programs, as well as their feasibility and limits, for solving or mitigating urb...
We seek to model the coupled evolution of a planet and a civilization through the era when energy harvesting by the civilization drives the planet into new and adverse climate states. In this way we ask if triggering "anthropocenes" of the kind humanity is experiencing now might be a generic feature of planet-civilization evolution. In this study w...
Urban trees play a key role in alleviating elevated summertime land surface temperatures in cities. However, urban landscape influences the capacity of urban trees to mitigate higher temperatures. We propose that both developed land characteristics and tree cover should be considered to accurately estimate the mitigation effects of canopy cover. We...
Urbanization is changing Earth's ecosystems by altering the interactions and feedbacks between the fundamental ecological and evolutionary processes that maintain life. Humans in cities alter the eco-evolutionary play by simultaneously changing both the actors and the stage on which the eco-evolutionary play takes place. Urbanization modifies land...
Cities are uniquely complex systems regulated by interactions and feedbacks between natural and social processes. Characteristics of human society – including culture, economics, technology, and politics – underlie social patterns and activity, creating a heterogeneous environment that can influence and be influenced by both ecological and evolutio...
Urban science seeks to understand the fundamental processes that drive, shape and sustain cities and urbanization. It is a multi/transdisciplinary approach involving concepts, methods and research from the social, natural, engineering and computational sciences, along with the humanities. This report is intended to convey the current “state of the...
This is a report on the discussions held during an NSF SUS conference “Graduate Education for a New Sustainable Urban Systems Science: Designing a New PhD Curriculum Integrating Sustainability Science and Urban Science”. The conference was motivated by the call made by the NSF for “...developing the next generation of sustainable urban systems scie...
Urban ecosystems are rapidly expanding throughout the world, but how urban growth affects the evolutionary ecology of species living in urban areas remains largely unknown. Urban ecology has advanced our understanding of how the development of cities and towns changes environmental conditions and alters ecological processes and patterns. However, d...
We present a framework for studying generic behaviors possible in the interaction between a resource-harvesting technological civilization (an exo-civilization) and the planetary environment in which it evolves. Using methods from dynamical systems theory, we introduce and analyze a suite of simple equations modeling a population which consumes res...
Global urbanization promises better services, stronger economies, and more connections; it also carries risks and unforeseeable consequences. To deepen our understanding of this complex process and its importance for global sustainability, we need to build interdisciplinary knowledge around a systems approach. Urban Planet takes an integrative look...
Global urbanization promises better services, stronger economies, and more connections; it also carries risks and unforeseeable consequences. To deepen our understanding of this complex process and its importance for global sustainability, we need to build interdisciplinary knowledge around a systems approach. Urban Planet takes an integrative look...
We develop a classification scheme for the evolutionary state of planets based on the non-equilibrium thermodynamics of their coupled systems, including the presence of a biosphere and the possibility of what we call an agency-dominated biosphere (i.e. an energy-intensive technological species). The premise is that Earths entry into the Anthropocen...
As human activity and environmental change come to be increasingly recognized as intertwined phenomena on a rapidly urbanizing planet, the field of urban ecology has risen to offer useful ways of thinking about coupled human and natural systems. On the forefront of this discipline is Marina Albert whose innovative work offers a conceptual framework...
North America contains some of the most urbanized landscapes in the world. In the United States (U.S.) and Canada, approximately 80 % of the population is urban, with Mexico slightly less (Kaiser Family Foundation 2013). Population growth combined with economic growth has fueled recent urban land expansion in North America. Between 1970 and 2000, u...
We are entering a new urban era in which the ecology of the planet as a whole is increasingly influenced by human activities (Ellis 2011; Steffen et al. 2011a, b; Folke et al. 2011). Cities have become a central nexus of the relationship between people and nature, both as crucial centres of demand of ecosystem services, and as sources of environmen...
The Snohomish Basin Scenarios (SBS) aim to support critical decisions for maintaining ecosystem functions in the Snohomish Basin in the long term despite irreducible uncertainty. The Project, led by the Urban Ecology Research Lab in partnership with a team of regional experts, aimed to develop and assess hypotheses about the future trajectories of...
The Puget Lowlands are the most rapidly changing ecoregion in the US, as a result of forestry management and urbanization. However, it is unlikely that the processes driving land cover changes are uniform across the entire Puget Sound lowlands. Forest management practices by vary by land owner, and urban land uses are usually spatially autocorrelat...
Detecting impervious surface in urban areas is critical to understanding the effects of urbanization on ecological processes. However, it presents unique challenges due to the spatial and spectral heterogeneity of the urban surfaces and the rapid changes in land cover that occur over short time periods. In this project, we develop a hybrid approach...
Understanding the role humans play in modifying ecosystems through changing land cover is central to addressing our current and emerging environmental challenges. In particular, the consequences of urban growth and land cover change on terrestrial carbon budgets is a growing issue for our rapidly urbanizing planet. Using the lowland Seattle Statist...
Historic land use is a potentially significant factor determining present day watershed condition. Previous research has shown that historical land uses can have lasting effects on watershed condition that are manifest in present day hydrologic and water quality variables. However, the relative importance of past land uses such as the extent and in...
The distributed hydrology–soil–vegetation model (DHSVM) was used to study the potential impacts of projected future land cover and climate change on the hydrology of the Puget Sound basin, Washington, in the mid-twenty-first century. A 60-year climate model output, archived for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment...
Urbanizing regions increasing challenge the ecosystem's capacity to deliver important ecological services to the human population and support human well-being. Scholars of urban ecology have hypothesized that the patterns of urbanization control ecosystem dynamics through complex interactions and feedback mechanisms linking urban activities and the...
This chapter presents a unified modeling approach to predict urban development, land-cover change, and ecosystem response to landscape change focusing on predicting the effects of future landscape change on avian communities as a case example of models that produce results useful to conservation planning across large landscapes. The Central Puget S...
Urbanization and the resulting changes in land cover have myriad impacts on ecological systems. Monitoring these changes across large spatial extents and long time spans requires synoptic remotely sensed data with an appropriate temporal sequence. We developed a multi-temporal land cover dataset for a six-county area surrounding the Seattle, Washin...
This is the second of two special issues in Progress in Planning exploring emerging research agendas in planning. It brings together scholars from diverse schools working on new areas of research and application in urban design and planning. Emergent research agendas include both novel areas of research and important shifts in the direction of a re...
This special issue explores emerging research agendas in planning. It brings together scholars from diverse schools working on new areas of research and application in urban design and planning. Emergent research agendas include both novel areas of research and important shifts in the direction of a research area. The challenge for planning schools...
The Puget Sound basin in northwestern Washington, USA has experienced substantial land cover and climate change over the last century. Using a spatially distributed hydrology model (the Distributed Hydrology-Soil-Vegetation Model, DHSVM) the concurrent effects of changing climate (primarily temperature) and land cover in the basin are deconvolved,...
A controversial issue in managing urbanizing watersheds is determining the scale at which conservation measures should be implemented. Current “best practices” suggest establishing riparian buffers along stream corridors and limiting impervious surfaces to prevent degradation of instream biological conditions. While there is increasing evidence tha...
Our central paradigm for urban ecology is that cities are emergent phenomena of local-scale, dynamic interactions among socioeconomic
and biophysical forces. These complex interactions give rise to a distinctive ecology and to distinctive ecological forcing
functions. Separately, both the natural and the social sciences have adopted complex system...
Humans have continuously interacted with natural systems, resulting in the formation and development of coupled human and natural systems (CHANS). Recent studies reveal the complexity of organizational, spatial, and temporal couplings of CHANS. These couplings have evolved from direct to more indirect interactions, from adjacent to more distant lin...
Urbanizing regions are major determinants of global and continental scale changes in carbon budgets through land transformation and modification of biogeochemical processes (Pataki et al. 2006). However, direct measurements of the effects of urbanization on carbon fluxes are extremely limited. In this paper we develop a strategy to quantify urban c...
As governments and institutions work to ameliorate the effects of anthropogenic CO2 emissions on global climate, there is an increasing need to understand how land-use and land-cover change is coupled to the carbon cycle, and how land management can be used to mitigate their effects. This book brings an interdisciplinary team of fifty-eight interna...
A 34 year time series (1972–2006) of Landsat imagery for a portion of Snohomish and King Counties, Washington (the Snohomish Water Resource Inventory Area (WRIA)) was analyzed to estimate the amount of land that was converted into impervious surface as a result of urban and residential development. Spectral unmixing was used to determine the fracti...
We used an integrated modeling approach to simulate future land cover and predict the effects of future urban development
and land cover on avian diversity in the Central Puget Sound region of Washington State, USA. We parameterized and applied
a land cover change model (LCCM) that used output from a microsimulation model of urban development, Urba...
Our central paradigm for urban ecology is that cities are emergent phenomena of local-scale, dynamic interactions among socioeconomic
and biophysical forces. These complex interactions give rise to a distinctive ecology and to distinctive ecological forcing
functions. Separately, both the natural and the social sciences have adopted complex system...
In this paper I build on current research in urban and ecological simulation modeling to develop a conceptual framework for modeling the urban ecosystem. Although important progress has been made in various areas of urban modeling, operational urban models are still primitive in terms of their ability to represent ecological processes. On the other...
Ecological studies of terrestrial urban systems have been approached along several kinds of contrasts: ecology in as opposed to ecology of cities; biogeochemical compared to organismal perspectives, land use planning versus biological, and disciplinary versus interdisciplinary. In order to point out how urban ecological studies are poised for signi...
One of the greatest challenges for natural and social scientists over the next few decades will be to understand how urbanizing regions evolve through the extraordinarily complex interactions between humans and biophysical processes. The challenge is to incorporate this complexity in studying urban ecosystems and their evolution. For more than a ce...
The future of Earth's ecosystems is increasingly influenced by the pace and patterns of urbanization. One of the greatest challenges for natural and social scientists is to understand how urbanizing regions evolve through the complex interactions between humans and ecological processes. Questions and methods of inquiry specific to our traditional d...
Urban Ecology is the study of ecosystems that include humans living in cities and urbanizing landscapes. It is an emerging, interdisciplinary field that aims to understand how human and ecological processes can coexist in human-dominated systems and help societies with their efforts to become more sustainable. It has deep roots in many disciplines...
Scholars working at the interface between ecology and the social sciences have started to articulate the opportunities and challenges for ecology to fully and productively integrate the complexity and global scale of human activity into ecological research (Liu et al. 2007). The future of Earth's ecosystems is increasingly influenced by human actio...
Urbanizing regions present challenges to ecosystem ecology, but the field may gain important insights from studying these areas. Earth's ecosystems are increasingly influenced by urbanization, and their functioning is dependent on the landscape patterns emerging in urbanizing regions. While ecosystem ecology still lacks a theory of ecosystem functi...
Humans have continuously interacted with natural systems, resulting in the formation and development of coupled human and natural systems (CHANS). Recent studies reveal the complexity of organizational, spatial, and temporal couplings of CHANS. These couplings have evolved from direct to more indirect interactions, from adjacent to more distant lin...
Integrated studies of coupled human and natural systems reveal new and complex patterns and processes not evident when studied
by social or natural scientists separately. Synthesis of six case studies from around the world shows that couplings between
human and natural systems vary across space, time, and organizational units. They also exhibit non...
Landscape change associated with urbanization poses major challenges to aquatic ecosystems. Extensive studies have shown that the composition of land cover within a watershed can account for much of the variability in water quality and stream ecological conditions. While several studies have addressed the relationship between watershed urbanization...
In the Puget Sound, the early settlement started in the mid-1800s. Since then population has increased by 17 times. Now, about 70% of Washington state popul