CAP LTER 2020 Progress Report NSF Site Review: October 21 – 23, 2020 CAP IV: December 2016 - Present 1 Contents 1. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................... 4 1.1. Overview of Report Organization and Structure ............................................................................... 4 1.2. A Brief History of CAP ..................................................................................................................... 4 1.3. Introducing CAP IV ........................................................................................................................... 5 1.4. The CAP IV Central Conceptual Framework .................................................................................... 5 1.5. The Concept of Urban Ecological Infrastructure (UEI) .................................................................... 6 1.6. How CAP is Organized ..................................................................................................................... 7 1.7. The CAP Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Social Contract .................................................... 7 1.8. Response to 2018 Program Officer Comments ................................................................................. 9 2.A. CAP RESEARCH: LONG-TERM EXPERIMENTS AND DATASETS .......................................... 10 2.1. Overview ......................................................................................................................................... 10 2.2. Change in Land Use/Land Cover/Land Configuration (LULCC) ................................................... 12 2.3. Spatiotemporal Heterogeneity ......................................................................................................... 12 2.4. Water Into, Within, and Out of the City .......................................................................................... 14 2.5. The DesFert Long-term Experiment ................................................................................................ 16 2.B CAP RESEARCH: IRT-SPECIFIC RESEARCH ............................................................................... 17 2.6 Overview .......................................................................................................................................... 17 2.7. Adapting to City Life ....................................................................................................................... 18 2.8. Residential Landscapes and Neighborhoods ................................................................................... 22 2.9. Climate and Heat ............................................................................................................................. 27 2.10. Parks and Rivers ............................................................................................................................ 30 2.11. Water and Fluxes ........................................................................................................................... 33 2.12. Governance and Institutions .......................................................................................................... 37 2.13. Scenarios and Futures .................................................................................................................... 38 2.14. Urban Design ................................................................................................................................. 43 3. NETWORK PARTICIPATION AND CROSS-SITE RESEARCH ....................................................... 46 3.1. Network Governance ....................................................................................................................... 46 3.2. Collaborations with the BES LTER ................................................................................................ 46 3.3. Collaborations with other Urban Research Teams and other LTER Programs ............................... 46 3.4. Other Collaborations Relevant to CAP ............................................................................................ 47 4. INFORMATION MANAGEMENT ....................................................................................................... 47 4.1. Overview ......................................................................................................................................... 47 4.2. Availability of Data, Metadata, and Other Relevant Digital Products ............................................ 49 4.3. Timeliness of Incorporating Relevant Data into the CAP Database ............................................... 49 4.4. Other Accomplishments in the Last 4 Years ................................................................................... 49 2 4.5. Network Contributions .................................................................................................................... 50 5. EDUCATION, OUTREACH, AND TRAINING ................................................................................... 50 5.1 Schoolyard LTER ............................................................................................................................. 50 5.2 REU Program ................................................................................................................................... 51 5.3 RET Program .................................................................................................................................... 51 5.4 Graduate Students and Postdocs ....................................................................................................... 51 5.5 Partnerships with Community Partners and Others .......................................................................... 52 6. SITE MANAGEMENT .......................................................................................................................... 53 6.1. Program Management Plan and Leadership Structure .................................................................... 53 6.2. Demographics of the CAP Community ........................................................................................... 54 6.3. CAP Transitions .............................................................................................................................. 55 6.4. Leveraged Funding .......................................................................................................................... 55 6.5. Institutional Commitment to CAP ................................................................................................... 56 7. LITERATURE CITED (2017 - PRESENT) ........................................................................................... 57 3 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1. Overview of Report Organization and Structure In this report we cover activities by the CAP LTER Program (hereafter CAP) during our fourth round of funding (CAP IV), from December 2016 through the present. We have organized the report to follow the NSF guidelines and begin with a brief history and overview of CAP, followed by our central conceptual framework, guiding concepts and how we are organized. We wrap up this introductory section with a discussion of our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Social Contract and related activities. Section 2 will detail our site-based research, followed by a summary of our network-level and cross-site activities in Section 3. Our information management efforts will be detailed in Section 4, and Section 5 will cover our education and outreach activities. We conclude the report with information on site/program management (Section 6). Throughout the report, we only cite references that have been published since 2017, for the sake of brevity, but a bibliography of all of CAP's publications may be found here. 1.2. A Brief History of CAP CAP, one of the two urban LTER sites, has been the hub for studies of complex social-ecological systems in the Phoenix metro area (Fig. 1.1) since 1997. Research in CAP I (1997–2004) and CAP II (2004–2010) addressed the question: How does the pattern of development of the city alter ecological conditions of the city and its surrounding environment, and how do ecological consequences of these developments feed back to the social system to generate future changes? From CAP I and II, we learned that land-use legacies have strong effects and that other social variables help explain ecological patterns (e.g., the “luxury effect,” whereby biodiversity is higher in wealthier neighborhoods). Our regional-scale research showed a high degree of heterogeneity in atmospheric deposition, soil nutrients, the nitrogen budget, exposure to toxic hazards, and landscape pattern. We also conducted historic analyses of land use/land cover change (LULCC) and of development and impact of the urban heat island (UHI) effect. In CAP III (2010–2016), we addressed feedbacks between social and ecological systems more explicitly, as mediated through ecosystem services (hereafter ES, defined as the benefits that people derive from Figure 1.1: The 6400 km2 CAP IV study ecosystems). We investigated human behavior and area in central Arizona (red) that outcomes in addition to ecological change, asking: How includes the Phoenix Metro Area do the services provided by evolving urban ecosystems (light gray within the red). Dark affect human outcomes and behavior, and how does lines are county boundaries. human action (response)