Civic ecology practices: Participatory approaches to generating and measuring ecosystem services in cities

Civic ecology practices are community-based, environmental stewardship actions taken to enhance green infrastructure, ecosystem services, and human well-being in cities and other human-dominated landscapes. Examples include tree planting in post-Katrina New Orleans, oyster restoration in New York City, community gardening in Detroit, friends of parks groups in Seattle, and natural area restoration in Cape Flats, South Africa. Whereas civic ecology practices are growing in number and represent a participatory approach to management and knowledge production as called for by global sustainability initiatives, only rarely are their contributions to ecosystem services measured. In this paper, we draw on literature sources and our prior research in urban social-ecological systems to explore protocols for monitoring biodiversity, functional measures of ecosystem services, and ecosystem services valuation that can be adapted for use by practitioner-scientist partnerships in civic ecology settings. Engaging civic ecology stewards in collecting such measurements presents opportunities to gather data that can be used as feedback in an adaptive co-management process. Further, we suggest that civic ecology practices not only create green infrastructure that produces ecosystem services, but also constitute social-ecological processes that directly generate ecosystem services (e.g., recreation, education) and associated benefits to human well-being.