research: urban streams
meeting summary
2nd Symposium on Urbanization and Stream Ecology
Presentations and Abstracts (powerpoint slides in PDF format)
We had 116 attendees from 8 countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, New Zealand, Spain, Taiwan and the U.S. Attendees represented various disciplinary perspectives, among them ecology, hydrology, geomorphology, engineering, microbiology, sociology and planning, and came from academia, government, and non-governmental organizations.
There were two main goals of the meeting: (1) synthesize what we know of how urbanization affects streams, including recent research; (2) identify the most significant outstanding research questions related to urban impacts on streams.
During the first day of the meeting there were 31 presentations-- 11 synthesis talks and 20 new research talks. During the second day we started with brief talks by four "managers"-- engineers, biologists and planners who presented their views on immediate research needs, as well as thoughts on how existing knowledge could be better transferred to practitioners. Then, we broke into four smaller groups to start brainstorming about outstanding research questions.
Although we started with a set of contributed questions that had been ranked through a web survey, most of the groups took a broader view and had open discussions which ultimately tended to produce more broadly-worded questions.
We took a break after lunch to hear perspectives from four speakers on how urban effects may be different outside the continental US, Australia and New Zealand, the countries represented by the speakers on day 1. The additional speakers were Eugenia Marti of Spain, Alonso Ramirez and Rebeca de Jesus of Puerto Rico, and Solange Filoso of Brazil; each gave a brief talk, after which we had open discussions. This session was added on and is not listed in the program.
Saturday afternoon the break-out groups continued their discussions, ultimately producing a set of 19 research questions, several of which had sub-questions. The "management" group also produced a list of action items for better communicating existing knowledge to managers and decision makers. Each group presented back to the full group, and we wrapped up the meeting with a brief discussion of next steps.
Those next steps are (1) to further refine the research questions and eventually produce a manuscript for peer-review publications; (2) create a special series of articles for J-NABS from selected conference talks and possibly other relevant articles; (3) draft a brief outreach document outlining the current state of knowledge on urban streams, and (4) explore other potential initiatives for communicating our current understanding of urban streams to the public.
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