Why Study Urban Nature in the Twin Cities?
The Twin Cities today as recognized by many peoples and cultures encompasses seven counties, 33 watershed management entities, and numerous municipalities. This includes urban nature, such as parks, yards, gardens, lakes, and streams, which provide a host of potential benefits for residents. For example, urban nature provides shade and evaporative cooling, helping cities adapt to heat waves exacerbated by climate change. Urban nature also provides habitat for wildlife and flood relief. But urban nature is subject to myriad unique stressors that may impact ecological communities and impair their capacity to provide benefits to urban residents. These stressors include amplified effects of climate change, habitat loss and fragmentation, contaminants, and invasive pests and pathogens. Furthermore, the benefits and burdens of urban nature are not felt equally by all urban residents.
Dakota People have lived, worked, and managed the lands and waters of Mni Sota Makoce (today called Minnesota) for thousands of years. The area we now call the Minneapolis-St. Paul, or Twin Cities, Metropolitan Area (MSP Region) is the traditional, historical, and contemporary lands of the Dakota People. There are deep continuous connections between the Dakota People and this landscape spanning from time immemorial to today.1
Our Approach to Studying Urban Nature
The Minneapolis-St. Paul Metropolitan Area (MSP) Long-Term Ecological Research Program (LTER) brings together over 100 researchers, educators, artists, and community organizers from the University of Minnesota, University of St. Thomas, USDA Forest Service, and other local institutions to study how urban stressors affect the ecological structure and functioning of urban nature, including pollinators, urban forests, urban watersheds, and lakes and streams. We also study how residents interact with and experience the benefits and burdens of urban nature, aiming to better understand urban nature and related policies and practices toward improving environmental outcomes for all residents.
Guided by the practice of community-engaged research, we partner with dozens of community and agency/government partners throughout the Twin Cities Metropolitan Area to conduct our work. We are exploring how such engagement changes researchers, community partners, and long-term urban nature research outcomes.
Through partnerships with educational institutions like the Bell Museum, the MSP LTER extends its research into local classrooms and the community. Middle school learners engage with the MSP LTER to learn state standards in Earth and life science through field trips to the Bell Museum. Museum visitors engage with hands-on exhibits inspired by MSP LTER research.
For more, see our Conceptual Model and Research Questions.
1. To learn more about the Dakota people's relationship to this region, please visit the Bdote Memory Map.