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Urban Agriculture And Ecosystem Services: A Typology And Toolkit For Planners, Kathleen Doherty

Masters Theses

This thesis makes the connection between urban agriculture and a specific suite of ecosystem services and lays out a typology and toolkit for planners to take advantage of these ecosystem services. The services investigated here are: food production, water management, soil health, biodiversity, climate mitigation, and community development benefits. Research from a variety of fields was aggregated and synthesized to prove that urban agriculture can be beneficial for human as well as environmental health.

A set of urban agriculture typologies was generated to illustrate best practices to maximize a particular set of ecosystem services. The typologies are: production farm, stormwater …

Estimating Stormwater Runoff For Community Gardens In New York City, Mara Gittleman

Theses and Dissertations

While much of the literature cites community gardens as providing urban ecosystem services, there is very little research quantifying these benefits. This thesis compares the stormwater runoff rates of urban vacant lots, community gardens, and residential developments in New York City and evaluates community gardens as green infrastructure.

The Impact Of Ecosystem Services Knowledge On Decisions, Stephen Mark Posner

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

The need to protect diverse biological resources from ongoing development pressures is one of today's most pressing environmental challenges. In response, "ecosystem services" has emerged as a conservation framework that links human economies and natural systems through the benefits that people receive from nature. In this dissertation, I investigate the science-policy interface of ecosystem services in order to understand the use of ecosystem service decision support tools and evaluate the pathways through which ecosystem services knowledge impacts decisions. In the first paper, I track an ecosystem service valuation project in California to evaluate how the project changes the social capacity …