Science Inventory

Defining Passive Green Infrastructure - An Ecosystem Services Perspective to Make It Count

Citation:

Shuster, W., M. Pavao-Zuckerman, A. Mayer, D. Herrmann, AND L. Schifman. Defining Passive Green Infrastructure - An Ecosystem Services Perspective to Make It Count. Journal of Sustainable Water in the Built Environment. American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), New York, NY, 8(3):02522001, (2022). https://doi.org/10.1061/JSWBAY.0000979

Impact/Purpose:

With all of the talk about green infrastructure and its multi-fold benefits, we may have substantial landscape area that passively provide ecosystem services. That is, without intentional management or modification of the landscape. This paper demonstrates how field data can be used by proxy to reveal ecosystem services. Our interpretation illustrates how municipalities can make extensive passive green infrastructure “count” as ecosystem services.

Description:

Green infrastructure is usually realized as contiguous, intentional green spaces that may also be actively managed landscapes recognized to produce ecosystem services. Urbanization modulates the structure of landscapes, and these novel, inadvertent and largely unmanaged landforms may then render different functions as suites of ecosystem services. We define these remnant urban green spaces as passive green infrastructure (PGI) that are interspersed with traditional, historical urban land uses (e.g., dense residential, industrial). We posit that PGI can be revealed by collecting proxy data for different ecosystem services, assess their present-absence and specific rendering of services. We use field assessment data (Detroit MI) to define PGI in the context of proxies for ecosystem services. Our interpretation illustrates how municipalities can make passive green infrastructure “count” as ecosystem services. We found that passive green infrastructures support other ecosystem services with surprisingly fertile native and fill soils with variable soil textural class (silt loam to fine sandy loam soils), a mean soil fill thickness of 107 cm (std. dev., ± 68 cm) containing an average of 21 ± 21 % volume rock fragments, each contributing to suitability for a wide variety of land re-use (development, agricultural, etc.); regulate stormwater runoff via relatively high yet variable infiltration (1.0 ± 1.9 cm hr-1, (mean ± 1 s.d.), n = 61) and drainage rates (5.5 ± 14.8 cm hr-1, n = 81); and provide water filtration by sorption of up to 2110 metric tons of polyaromatic hydrocarbons to soil black carbon resources. We go on to discuss how cultural and social perspectives can create forums where individual and community values and associated tensions with passive green infrastructure may result in a continuum of perspectives and perceptions of ecosystem service delivery. Once revealed, services passively rendered from surfeits of unmaintained park and vacant land can then be accounted for and leveraged toward sustaining cities as they adaptively respond by to the challenges of degraded water infrastructure, a smaller tax base and fewer ratepayers. We conclude that assessment data is essential to identify ecosystem services to the community and municipal utilities, and then to create a context for citizens to develop different relationships with a changing urban landform.