Visionmaker Jamaica Bay: Analysis of community-generated adaptation strategies to enhance resilient ecosystems in and around Jamaica Bay, post-Hurricane Sandy
Eric W. Sanderson, Giampieri M, Fisher K, Allred S, DuBois B, Bunting-Howarth K, Meixler M, Barr J. 2019. Visionmaker Jamaica Bay: Analysis of community-generated adaptation strategies to enhance resilient ecosystems in and around Jamaica Bay, post-Hurricane Sandy. Natural Resource Report. NPS/NCBN/NRR—2019/1925. National Park Service. Fort Collins, Colorado
To support efforts to make Jamaica Bay more resilient and to enhance ecosystem management in part of the Gateway National Recreation Area, this project developed a free, online tool called Visionmaker Jamaica Bay (https://visionmaker.us/nyc/jamaicabay/) that enables anyone to develop, evaluate and share their own ideas for the future of Jamaica Bay and its watershed in New York City. Launched on June 30, 2015 as part of this project, Visionmaker Jamaica Bay includes several advances specific to ecosystem management for urban coastal areas, including elements that treat climate resiliency, evaluate ecosystem responses to adaptation and restoration strategies, and identify sources of vulnerability. We added new ecosystem relevant to management of the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, added new metrics of the economic costs and benefits associated with landscape change, introduced new calculations that better estimate species richness and provide estimates of species composition depending on user visions, and implemented a new raster tiling scheme to improve processing times and avoid crashes. Drawing on a wide array of data about the natural and built environment of New York City, Visionmaker Jamaica Bay provides a set of choices/parameters to develop and share visions of resilience as defined by different users. Visions include representations of the ecosystem geography of Jamaica Bay or some subset of the area; choices about lifestyle parameters; and a selection of a climate scenario to be evaluated. Visionmaker then returns a set of model results about the effects of the user’s vision on the area’s hydrology, carbon emissions and sequestration, biodiversity, and population. Through this project we also added new metrics of the costs to change ecosystems from one type to another. These options and the suite of model results allows users to broadly explore what resilience means to them on their own terms. Our general definition of resilience captures two aspects of system dynamics: “1. able to bounce back after change or adversity; and 2. capable of preparing for, responding to and recovering from difficult conditions” (NYC 2013). Visionmaker is a tool to help managers, educators, community activists, and local residents create and share visions at different scales, and with different foci, but in the same framework, enabling comparision and discussion. To investigate how different communities of practice envision Jamaica Bay’s resilience, we conducted 12 workshops in cooperation with the new Science Resilience Institute at Jamaica Bay and location institutions. We targeted land managers, researchers, K-12 educators, environmental NGO-members, and Community Board members. While these workshops only yielded 63 visions from 82 users, over the project period 12,326 visions were created city-wide. We analyzed who, how and why users were using Visionmaker Jamaica Bay in our workshops and examined user visions of adaptation to sea level rise and climate change.
- Type
- Published Report
- Authors
- Eric W. Sanderson; Giampieri, Mario; Fisher, Kim; Allred, Shorna; DuBois, Bryce; Bunting-Howarth, Katherine; Meixler, Marci; Barr, Jason
- Date of Issue
- 2019-05
- Publisher
- National Park Service
- Units
- GATE , NCBN , NRSS
- Keywords
- 2265049, climate resiliency, ecosystem management, ecosystem responses, GATE, Gateway National Recreation Area, Hurricane Sandy, Jamaica Bay, NCBN, New York City, Northeast Coastal and Barrier Network, sources of vulnerability, urban coastal areas, Visionmaker