Neighborhood Socio-Ecohydrology along a Gradient of Urbanization

The work reported here represents a fundamental building block of a larger project that attempts to build the human and research infrastructure needed to understand and tackle the challenges of water sustainability in Utah now and in the future. A major emphasis is the integration of both ecohydrologic and social science research to encompass the complexities of water dynamics in urbanizing watersheds located within arid climatic regions. Our study area includes three neighboring watersheds representing a gradient of urbanization intensity, from relatively pristine montane slopes, to agriculture-dominated rural areas, to the heart of urban Salt Lake City. In order to design an effective social and biophysical instrumentation network along this gradient, it was necessary to identify socio-ecohydrologic contexts that are meaningful and measurable expressions of the diverse ways humans occupy this landscape. Our challenge was to develop a typology of neighborhoods that would reflect combinations of measurable attributes that link urban characteristics and water system outcomes. A subset of these neighborhoods will then be selected for instrumentation and further coordinated data collection on social, engineering, biophysical, and ecological outcomes. Our urban socio-ecohydrology typology was constructed using a wide range of data to characterize Census Block Groups (CBGs) across the Wasatch Range Metropolitan Area (WRMA). CBGs are geographic areas created by the US Census and approximate ';neighborhoods' in most urban settings. Only CBGs with population densities over 50 persons per square mile were included in our typology. A wide range of independent variables were used in a statistical factor/cluster analysis to identify distinctive combinations of land cover, land use, built environment, household structure, socioeconomic status, water infrastructure, policy, and climate characteristics. Variables used in the typology classification were selected because they represented characteristics of socio-ecohydrologic contexts that have been linked to particular patterns of water use, evapotranspiration, groundwater recharge, and surface water flows and fluxes. Over time, we will use the typology to explore the impacts of urban form on this suite of hydrologic outcomes and the ecosystem services that are driven by flows and fluxes of water in the urban landscape.