As demonstrated in many studies, mostly in rural settings, successful resource management requires collaboration among many groups. This is likely to be even more pronounced in densely settled urban areas. Cities generally consist of many fragmented land parcels under different types of use and ownership, which produces a large and diverse group of stakeholders with an interest in resource management decisions.

Environmental justice research seeks to understand the patterns and processes shaping the distribution of environmental burdens and amenities across society. While environmental justice research in the US has generally focused on toxics, urban design, hazard management, and segregation have reshaped patterns of risk associated with environmental processes, such as flooding, and the social patterns of exposure to those risks. In Baltimore, flood risks have been a major impetus behind the engineering of the hydrologic systems of the city.

Humans make decisions daily that impact biodiversity, and it is essential that citizens understand the implications of these decisions. Yet, ecological systems are extremely complex, with many details still being discovered. Our challenge is to identify the underlying principles and concepts governing the distribution of organisms, and then communicate these details to students in a way that influences their citizenship decisions as participants in local and global communities. 

The EcoTrends Project began in 2004 as a joint collaboration among the LTER Program, USDA Agricultral Research Service, and the USDA Forest Service with two goals: (1) to create a book illustrating trends in long -term data and showing the value of long-term data across a network of sites in addressing continental-scale questions, and (2) to make long-term biotic and abiotic data easily accessible through a common web interface with a focus on derived or aggregated data to allow cross-site analyses to be made.

With recent shifts in public attitudes across the United States concerning the problem of global climate change, momentum is building for aggressive action to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, the ongoing economic recession presents challenges for financing an aggressive climate change abatement campaign; hence, it is imperative that cost-effective strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions be identified and pursued. To accomplish this, policy instruments will need to be tailored to a complex range of local and regional conditions.

The Baltimore Partnership for Environmental Science Literacy is a five year research project aimed at improving Baltimore area teacher and student knowledge in the environmental sciences. The Baltimore Partnership is part of the multi-site Culturally Relevant Ecology, Learning Progressions and Environmental Literacy, Math Science Partnership (MSP) project funded by the National Science Foundation. The project focuses on the critical education juncture of students in grades 6-12.

Human land use has dramatically increased coastal watershed nitrogen exports contributing to eutrophication. Improved knowledge of sources and transformations of nitrogen in agricultural and urbanizing watersheds will be critical in developing effective coastal catchment restoration strategies. We investigated effects of land use, hydrologic conditions, and aging infrastructure on nitrogen sources and transformations in forest, agricultural, and urbanizing catchments at the Baltimore Ecosystem Study LTER site.

Urban landscapes contain a mix of land-use types with different patterns of carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) cycling and export. These patterns affect interactions between ecosystems and the atmosphere.  We have measured soil:atmosphere fluxes of carbon dioxide (CO₂), nitrous oxide (N₂O) and methane (CH₄) in four urban grassland and eight forested long-term study plots in the Baltimore, MD USA metropolitan area monthly since 1998.

Urban ecosystems present ecologists with the unique opportunity to study ecological communities in the context of drastic structural and environmental change unprecedented in pristine environments. Metacommunity theory organizes a suite of predictions of how species assemble locally from the regional species pool. Understanding assemblage structure in urban ecosystems requires a revised perspective embracing human behavior and decision-making.