Applications of the measured results and lessons learned through the ongoing BES research address the project's third central research question:
How can urban residents develop and use an understanding of the metropolis as an ecological system to improve the quality of their environment and their daily lives?
To begin answering this question, the BES has constructed a broad array of community education and outreach programs, designed to translate the scientific research of the study in to lessons accessible by general audiences. The project website features numerous downloadable teaching tools for elementary and middle school teachers. High school and undergraduate college students are encouraged to jump in to the research. The program includes many opportunities to participate in practically every aspect of the research work.
These educational initiatives offer examples of how research results can be fed back in to the community from which the results flow, and they highlight the importance of improving environmental literacy. But what about the fields of urban planning and design? What are the applications of the BES - whether through analysis of the data itself, or through learning from the methods and techniques employed in the BES?
Urban designers and planners might not gain a great deal of utility from the raw data generated in the BES study, but the vast array of measurement techniques, analysis methodologies, and statistical findings are of immense value to these professions. For instance, a city planning office attempting to encourage more environmental sustainability in its province can learn from the BES research, both directly -- through reading the literature emerging from the study (which challenges a number of long-held general assumptions about the relationship of societies and their built environments), or indirectly -- through adapting and adopting the processes and methodologies utilized in the BES for the study of their own provinces.
Making better decisions through better understanding
"Municipal policy makers, real estate developers and private individuals make decisions which affect the physical design of the built environment. Most current designs are based on assumptions about what a city should be and what it should look like. The Urban Design Working Group of BES is striving to design new urban models for Baltimore based in urban ecosystem science."
Studying the ecosystem at work in a city is a crucial step toward addressing larger challenges facing contemporary urban designers and planners. The adage "what gets measured gets managed" holds especially true for the complex decision-making factors that a city strategizing for sustainability would face.
The BES has already begun to generate an ultra high-resolution dataset of processes at work in the Baltimore ecosystem. In some cases, the data are observed and aggregated in real time, revealing otherwise hidden patterns and processes. The raw data collected is probably of most utility to impacting decision-making within the geographic area of study, as environmental conditions can vary from city to city. However, the BES offers urban designers and planners everywhere a roadmap of sorts, towards implementing similar analytical systems in their respective areas.
The high resolution dataset enables Baltimore's urban designers and planners to understand and help mitigate undesirable environmental impacts, with a much more fine-grained understanding of how proposed interventions will contribute to mitigation. For example, the urban heat island effect can be reduced drastically through incorporating healthy plants, reducing dark asphalt land cover, integrating green roofs, and a number of other well-understood techniques. Baltimore's planners can, for example, understand at even the neighborhood scale where such interventions would contribute the most to mitigation. Such understanding increases the likelihood that proposed interventions are directed toward areas where they will contribute the most to the desired effect.