Chicago Metropolitan Region Research Articles

Unequally distributed education impacts of ecosystem degradation: Evidence from an invasive species

Ecosystem degradation can have substantial social and economic costs, which may vary across groups in society. In this paper, we leverage variation from the introduction of the emerald ash borer beetle to explore how invasive species-induced declines in environmental quality impact education outcomes in a metropolitan setting. Exploiting the idiosyncratic and staggered spread of the ash borer throughout the Chicago Metropolitan Region from 2006 to 2014, we show that infestation led to declines in tree cover and subsequently, education outcomes. Our findings indicate that ash borer infestation reduced canopy cover in affected areas, stemming from both increased tree cover loss and declines in tree cover gain. Further, the ash borer reduced standardized test performance at exposed schools. Infestation exposure led to an average of 1 percentage point (1.22%) fewer students that met or exceeded the state’s testing benchmark at the typical school. While exposure to ash borer infestation was lower around low-income schools, education impacts were concentrated almost entirely among low-income students. This work adds to our understanding of the environmental drivers of education outcomes and the unequally distributed impacts of human-induced environmental change.

The racial composition of road users, traffic citations, and police stops

This paper exploits the potential of Global Positioning System datasets sourced from mobile phones to estimate the racial composition of road users, leveraging data from their respective Census block group. The racial composition data encompasses approximately 46 million trips in the Chicago metropolitan region. The research focuses on the relationship between camera tickets and racial composition of drivers vs. police stops for traffic citations and the racial composition in these locations. Black drivers exhibit a higher likelihood of being ticketed by automated speed cameras and of being stopped for moving violations on roads, irrespective of the proportion of White drivers present. The research observes that this correlation attenuates as the proportion of White drivers on the road increases. The citation rate measured by cameras better matches the racial composition of road users on the links with cameras than do stops by police officers. This study therefore presents an important contribution to understanding racial disparities in moving violation stops, with implications for policy interventions and social justice reforms.

Estimating hidden relationships in dynamical systems: Discovering drivers of infection rates of COVID-19.

Discovering causal influences among internal variables is a fundamental goal of complex systems research. This paper presents a framework for uncovering hidden relationships from limited time-series data by combining methods from nonlinear estimation and information theory. The approach is based on two sequential steps: first, we reconstruct a more complete state of the underlying dynamical system, and second, we calculate mutual information between pairs of internal state variables to detail causal dependencies. Equipped with time-series data related to the spread of COVID-19 from the past three years, we apply this approach to identify the drivers of falling and rising infections during the three main waves of infection in the Chicago metropolitan region. The unscented Kalman filter nonlinear estimation algorithm is implemented on an established epidemiological model of COVID-19, which we refine to include isolation, masking, loss of immunity, and stochastic transition rates. Through the systematic study of mutual information between infection rate and various stochastic parameters, we find that increased mobility, decreased mask use, and loss of immunity post sickness played a key role in rising infections, while falling infections were controlled by masking and isolation.

Parking Management and Commuter Rail: The Case of Northeastern Illinois

This article examines the relationship between parking management and commuter rail transit using the Chicago metropolitan area in northeastern Illinois as a case example. Commuter rail transit and parking management are discussed within the broader context of transportation planning in the Chicago metropolitan region. Commuter rail ridership, mode of station access, and parking utilization rates are compared. Related air quality, social equity, and land-use concerns are reviewed.There are no simple solutions to the problem of spillover parking around commuter rail stations. The construction of new parking can be expensive. Raising parking prices may induce spillover parking. Doing nothing to address observed parking shortages may inhibit ridership. Shared parking is an excellent compromise in many situations, but even this is far from a universal solution.

Long-Term Growth of Highway Rights-of-Way Trees

Background: Highway rights-of-ways (ROWs, or verges) contain multiple stressors which can influence tree growth, including compacted soils, soils with little topsoil, poor drainage, air and soil pollutants, construction activities, and de-icing salts in cold climates. Yet highway ROWs often provide ample planting space for growing trees, which can contribute to the mitigation of negative environmental impacts associated with highways. Methods: For this study, we assessed the trunk diameter of 1,058 trees from 11-, 22-, and 31-year-old planting cohorts along a highway in the Chicago metropolitan region (Illinois, USA) to examine factors which could influence long-term growth. We analyzed the impact of location factors within the ROW (e.g., distance and elevation relative to highway, slope, and aspect) on trunk diameter at breast height (DBH), since these factors are relevant to the landscape design process. Using estimates from i-Tree, we compared carbon sequestration, carbon storage, runoff reduction, and air-pollution removal within and among the 3 cohorts. Results: Of the 6 site location characteristics we evaluated, no single characteristic consistently impacted DBH, though some characteristics were significant within a single cohort. DBH measurements of most species were smaller than model predictions based on existing urban tree models. Since all cohorts included large- and small-statured trees, and even within species DBH could be highly variable, the range in per-tree ecosystem services varied substantially within cohorts, especially the 31-year-old cohort. Conclusions: These findings highlight both the potential for and challenges of growing trees alongside highways.

Understanding Perceptions, Barriers, and Opportunities around Restorative Justice in Urban High Schools

A popular alternative disciplinary framework from zero-tolerance school policies is restorative justice, which refers to a set of ideologies and practices that emphasize healing relationships in lieu of community exclusion. This work investigates the differences between ideological support for restorative approaches compared to program implementation. We conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews with school staff, including teachers, administrators, and security officials, at five urban high schools in the Chicago metropolitan region. Our findings highlight sharp divergences in buy-in for restorative justice and perceptions on the appropriateness of various disciplinary approaches, illuminating both barriers and opportunities towards schoolwide restorative justice program implementation.

The role of conserved and managed land in ecosystem service inequity

Integrating ecosystem services (ESs), i.e., the benefits humans obtain from nature, into decision making is essential for the sustainable management of resilient urban landscapes, where people and nature are interdependent. However, ES spatial assessments often leave unanswered important questions about their relationship to social systems and their implications in management. In this study, we identified ES provisioning areas in the Chicago metropolitan region that have potential to produce ESs across multiple ES-categories (i.e., ES hotspots). We also identified areas lacking this capacity (i.e., ES coldspots). We then analyzed spatial linkages to local demographics. Specifically, we: (1) modelled the distribution of ES hotspots and ES coldspots at 30-m resolution; (2) compared the proportion of total ES-hotspot and ES-coldspot land area to that of racial groups and residents living below the poverty line; and (3) determined overlap of ES hotspots and ES coldspots with conservation, managed and public open land. We found that, at regional level, ES-hotspots correlate negatively with racial minorities. We also observed that a great number of ES hotspots overlap with conserved and government-managed land, but because these land types inversely correlate with racial minorities it is likely that these cannot serve to alleviate race-based ES inequality if targeted. Therefore, we made a number of suggestions on how to circumvent this issue, including acquiring land (for conservation) in areas where racial minorities live the most, particularly targeting vacant lots and grassland within the City of Chicago to address ES inequity in the region.

Long‐Term Trends Show Improvements in Water Quality in the Chicago Metropolitan Region With Investment in Wastewater Infrastructure, Deep Tunnels, and Reservoirs

AbstractThe ecological degradation of streams draining urban land, known as the urban stream syndrome, is characterized by elevated nutrients and contaminants, increased hydrologic flashiness, and altered biotic assemblages. This study demonstrated an improvement in chemical characteristics by evaluating water quality trends from 1975 to 2012 and from 2013 to 2018 in the Chicago, Calumet, and Des Plaines River Systems in Cook County, Illinois. Data from 41 monitoring locations were compiled and 11 water quality parameters were analyzed for long‐term monotonic trends and differences in water quality parameters between select time periods to investigate the outcomes from improvements in water reclamation plant (WRP) and tunnel and reservoir infrastructure carried out by the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago. From 1975 to 2012, significant decreasing trends in concentrations were demonstrated at most sampling locations for total organic carbon (TOC), total Kjeldahl nitrogen (TKN), ammonium nitrogen (), total suspended solids (TSS), fecal coliform (FC), and sulfate. Significant increasing trends were demonstrated for dissolved oxygen (DO) and chloride concentrations and temperature. Total phosphorus (TP) concentrations increased downstream of the Stickney, Kirie, and Calumet WRPs from 1975 to 2012, but decreased downstream of the Kirie WRP and had no trends downstream of the Stickney and Calumet WRPs from 2013 to 2018. Improvements in TKN, , TOC, TSS, FC, TP, and DO concentrations over four decades demonstrated the benefits of expanding secondary wastewater treatment and implementing the Tunnel and Reservoir Plan System, instream and side‐stream elevated pool aeration stations, and effluent disinfection.

Characterizing lentic habitats in golf courses and adjacent green spaces: water quality, water chemistry, pesticide concentrations, and algal concentrations

As human-dominated land-use increases globally, urbanization is a prominent cause of a decline in natural areas, including lentic ecosystems (i.e. lakes, ponds and wetlands). Lentic ecosystems in urban green spaces, such as parks, golf courses or forest preserves, could provide important habitat for organisms within the urban matrix. However, there is a lack of data comparing lentic habitats across these land-use types. We quantified the area of golf courses and forest preserve habitats in the Chicago Metropolitan Region. We measured pesticide concentrations, water chemistry, physicochemical parameters and algal composition in lentic habitats of golf courses and forest preserves in the spring and summer of 2017. Permanent ponds, whether located within a golf course or forest preserve, had similar water quality, chemistry and chlorophyll a and phycocyanin, but differed from ephemeral ponds in forest preserves. Pesticide concentrations within golf course ponds were found in 11 of 25 courses, but only three pesticides (out of 10 measured) were detected. These data suggest golf courses can provide lentic habitats of similar quality to other adjacent land-use types. Additional study is needed to document their role in providing habitat for aquatic biota and sustaining ecosystem services in urban landscapes.

How Long-Term Acute Care Hospitals Can Play an Important Role in Controlling Carbapenem-Resistant Enterobacteriaceae in a Region: A Simulation Modeling Study.

Typically, long-term acute care hospitals (LTACHs) have less experience in and incentives to implementing aggressive infection control for drug-resistant organisms such as carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) than acute care hospitals. Decision makers need to understand how implementing control measures in LTACHs can impact CRE spread regionwide. Using our Chicago metropolitan region agent-based model to simulate CRE spread and control, we estimated that a prevention bundle in only LTACHs decreased prevalence by a relative 4.6%-17.1%, averted 1,090-2,795 new carriers, 273-722 infections and 37-87 deaths over 3 years and saved $30.5-$69.1 million, compared with no CRE control measures. When LTACHs and intensive care units intervened, prevalence decreased by a relative 21.2%. Adding LTACHs averted an additional 1,995 carriers, 513 infections, and 62 deaths, and saved $47.6 million beyond implementation in intensive care units alone. Thus, LTACHs may be more important than other acute care settings for controlling CRE, and regional efforts to control drug-resistant organisms should start with LTACHs as a centerpiece.

Regional Planning and Institutional Norms in the United States: Civic Society, Regional Planning, and City-Region Building in the Chicago Metropolitan Region

Willem Salet’s Public Norms and Aspirations poses the question of civic society’s role in twenty-first-century projects of regional planning and city-region building. This paper examines a regional policy coordination and planning tradition where civic society has been instrumental in reproducing and expanding regional planning capacity: the Chicago metropolitan region. Using archival methods and semi-structured interviews with regional policy coordination veterans, the author charts the critical role that civic society played in supporting regional planning capacity, where brokerage between public norms and institutionalized planning practice was critical to the survival of the Chicagoland planning tradition.

Policy cohesion and post-recession economic imaginaries: manufacturing discourse in the Chicago metropolitan region

ABSTRACT This paper examines the proliferation of the Chicago metropolitan region’s post-recession regional economic development initiatives, and a consequent shift towards manufacturing-centric development programmes among regional planning bodies and public–private institutions. This phenomenon provides important insights about the post-recession economic development policy terrain in mature city-regions and the politics of economic development imaginaries. While there has been justified celebration of a new creativity in urban and regional economic development and industrial policy in the geographical literature, the Chicagoland case indicates that defensive actions, meant to recode older, disciplinary attitudes towards the region’s labour pools and lobbying from region’s industrial capitals, are an important element of the region’s post-recession policy coordination. What is dubbed herein as ‘manufacturing discourse’ in Chicagoland originates in institutions endogenous to the region’s industrial capitals and represents a longer term project of maintaining a specific type of socio-spatial fix as the predominant mode of crisis response among the region’s governance bodies, civil society and fractions of capital. In turn, it is argued that geographers and urban scholars need to theorize properly about the link between ‘soft’ economic imaginaries and the protection of power centres within city-regions, particularly amid state rationality crises and bursts of policy experimentation.

A dynamic and spatially explicit modeling approach to identify the ecosystem service implications of complex urban systems interactions

A comprehensive understanding and modeling of socio-ecological systems can better assess how human-induced urban growth affects ecosystem service. This paper demonstrates a comprehensive socio-ecological system modeling approach to identify ecosystem service impacts that result from human activities within large, complex urban systems. It adds to the existing ecosystem impact assessment approaches by integrating spatiotemporal and socio-ecological process model with dynamic interaction and feedback between models and policies. The approach couples regional economics, urban land-use, and ecosystem interactions in a fine scaled (30 × 30 m) modeling framework with multiple time steps and feedback. The coupled model fuses a regional econometric input-output model with a dynamic land-use allocation model that spatially allocates the residential and commercial lands that are needed to satisfy the identified economic changes on an annual basis. A dynamic and spatially explicit index is constructed to measure the potential impacts of the economic/land use interactions on available ecosystem services. A scenario analysis is performed to test various ecologically oriented policy outcomes against noted ecosystem service impacts. The Chicago metropolitan region constitutes the study area with forecasts to 2040. Analysis results prove that models without inclusion of feedback dynamics and uncertainties could significantly under-estimate resulting ecosystem service impacts without. The scenario simulation shows a significant land-use developmental pattern restructure occurs when preservative policies are reinforced and significant ecosystem service loss reduction can also be achieved.

Nonfatal Firearm Violence Trends on the Westside of Chicago Between 2005 and 2016

This paper examines the epidemiology of nonfatal firearm violence (NFFV) on the Westside of Chicago over three finite time periods: 2005–2008, 2009–2012, and 2013–2016. The trend analysis will look at any significant changes over the time periods and describe the demographic characteristics of NFFV. A descriptive analysis of Mount Sinai Hospital (MSH) Emergency Department (ED) data was conducted. NFFV patients were identified by specific firearm ICD-9 primary eCode injury categories: accident, assault, legal intervention, undetermined intent, suicide or self-inflicted injury, and legal intervention. The Pearson Chi-square test was conducted to statistically compare the categorical frequencies of the Chicago metropolitan region of injury, cause of firearm related injury, and place of injury by time period. There were a total of 3962 nonfatal hospitalizations at MSH between the three time periods due to gun violence related injuries. Overall, nonfatal hospitalizations were most frequent for those between age groups 16–24 (52.5%). The number of nonfatal hospitalizations decreased with increasing age for the age groups 35–44 (9.7%), 45–54 (3.2%), and > 54 (1.2%). There were significantly more nonfatal hospitalizations in males (n = 3649) than females (n = 312) across the three time periods. However, there was a 74.7% increase in female nonfatal hospitalizations from 2009–2012 to 2013–2016. There were significant racial differences in nonfatal hospitalizations between the three time periods. NFFV continues to be problem on the Westside of Chicago, particularly for young, Black men. The incidence of gun violence however has not changed significantly between 2005 and 2016.

The Collaboration Riskscape: Fragmentation, Problem Types and Preference Divergence in Urban Sustainability

Abstract Local governmental efforts to achieve greater sustainability have come to play a prominent role within urbanized regions. Despite the prominence of collaboration and collective action in the inter-governmental literature, we know little about how the collaborative mechanisms used to address them are influenced by the configurations of horizontal, general-purpose governments and vertical, single-purpose governments. We combine national- and metropolitan-level analyses through a mixed-methods design to fill this lacuna. The first component examines how fragmentation influences choices of mechanisms for interlocal collaboration utilizing surveys of U.S. cities. The second component examines collaboration barriers between localities in a single metropolitan area through qualitative analysis of interviews conducted with twenty city managers in the Chicago metropolitan region, one of the most fragmented in the United States. These analyses offer evidence to support the conclusion that more fragmented regions may be better suited to overcome coordination risks and find more avenues for collaborative activities. However, preference heterogeneity within fragmented environments increases the risk of defection and thus offsets some advantages of polycentricity.

Human land use as a driver of plant community composition in wetlands of the Chicago metropolitan region

Anthropogenic alteration of the landscape has facilitated plant community change and non-native species invasion in urban areas. We used species occurrence data from over 2000 wetlands within the Chicago metropolitan region to classify urban wetlands into community types and examined non-native species composition across community types. Non-native species were widespread across the region, occurring in over 99% of wetlands. On average, 35% of the plant species in individual wetlands were non-native. A single non-native species, Phalaris arundinacea, was present in 74% of wetlands. Six wetland community types were identified (wet meadows, marshes, forested wetlands, farmed wetlands/mudflats, roadside marshes, and an undetermined wetland type), with each having aggressively spreading non-natives amongst the most common plant species. We conducted canonical correspondence analysis to evaluate the contribution of surrounding land cover, roads, and location of wetlands to plant community composition in these wetlands, and found that similar changes to the landscape have resulted in similar combinations of native and non-native species. Differences in species composition reflected spatial gradients in land use from urban to rural areas across the region, as well as proximity to major roads. Anthropogenic drivers have resulted in profound and pervasive changes to wetland communities across the region, creating novel habitats and ultimately novel community types.

Covariation between local and landscape factors influences the structure of ground-active arthropod communities in fragmented metropolitan woodlands

The world is becoming increasingly urbanized, with more than half of the global population now living in cities. Understanding the factors impacting natural communities in fragmented landscapes is therefore crucial for predicting how the remaining ecosystems will respond to global change. Ground-active arthropods, which are important in nutrient cycling, are likely sensitive to habitat changes resulting from urbanization. We addressed two questions: (1) What is the relative importance of local and landscape factors in shaping ground-active arthropod communities in urban woodlands? (2) How does body size (as a surrogate for dispersal ability) affect sensitivity to landscape-level factors? In the summers of 2010 and 2011, we sampled ground-active arthropod communities in 19 woodlands in the Chicago metropolitan region using pitfall traps. We also assessed local plant and soil characteristics, as well as landscape-level variables using GIS. Redundancy analyses and variation partitioning revealed that local factors, particularly invasive woody-plant cover and soil nitrate, had the most influence on arthropod communities, explaining 12% of the total variation. Of the landscape-level variables, landscape richness, which is one measure of landscape fragmentation, explained the most variation; however, the shared variance between landscape and local variables was responsible for half (16%) of the total explained variation (32%). Landscape factors alone explained only 4% of variation. No relationship between arthropod body size and landscape variables was observed, but several groups (e.g. ants and ground beetles) were correlated with landscape-level factors. Our research shows that both local and landscape variables are important in influencing ground-active arthropods, but the majority of explained variance is attributed to the covariation between landscape richness, invasive woody-plant cover, and soil nitrate. We therefore conclude that landscape fragmentation is likely affecting the ground-active arthropods through its positive influence on invasive woody plants and soil nitrogen.

Distribution and Factors Controlling Soil Organic Carbon in the Chicago Region, Illinois, USA

Core Ideas The majority (>75%) of soil organic carbon was found at depths greater than 25 cm. Compared to other soils, soil organic carbon in Chicago is relatively high (25–75 kg m‐2). Anthropogenic factors were the most important predictors of Chicago soil organic carbon. Information on soil organic carbon (SOC) storage and dynamics in urban ecosystems will improve the accuracy of global and regional C budgets, sink and source projections of urban SOC with disturbance and climate change, and soil management for maximization of ecosystem services. Soil organic C (0–100 cm) was measured on 190 (0.04 ha) plots in the seven‐county Chicago metropolitan region (14,625 km2) to understand and model SOC distribution across an urban landscape. Most SOC (>75%) was at depths greater than 25 cm and these data suggest that 100 cm may not be deep enough to fully capture SOC in urban ecosystems. Compared to other terrestrial ecosystems (e.g., forests, prairies), SOC across the Chicago region is relatively high (25–75 kg m−2). Chicago region SOC was comparable to other urban ecosystems. Chicago region SOC was highest in the most urbanized areas (e.g., commercial, industrial, utility, transportation land use categories) and lowest in agriculture lands. A state‐factor model was used to predict SOC storage. Soil forming factors such as climate, parent material, relief, and tree cover were not important predictors of SOC density. Important predictors of SOC across the Chicago region were land‐use and other anthropogenic factors (e.g., impervious surface area; distance to the city center, nearest building, highway and street) as well as surface (0–25 cm) soil properties (e.g., SOC, pH, K, microbial biomass, electrical conductivity). These results suggest that urban soils store considerable amounts of SOC, and this storage should be considered in global and regionals C budgets.

Variation in urban forest productivity and response to extreme drought across a large metropolitan region

The growth and survival of urban trees and maintenance of urban forest canopy are important considerations in adaptation of urban regions to climate change, especially in relation to increasing frequency of extreme climatic events such as drought. However, urban forest growth and drought response may vary considerably within large urban landscapes across gradients in land use, urbanization, forest composition and structure, and environmental factors. We quantified urban forest growth and resilience and resistance to extreme drought in the greater Chicago metropolitan region based on patterns of annual basal area production from increment core analysis. We evaluated variation in growth and drought response in relation to a broad urban to rural gradient, land-use categories, local-scale environmental predictors, and forest community characteristics. Urban forest growth varied greatly among land-use classes and major genera. Plot-level variation in productivity was predicted most strongly (R2 = 0.53) by total plot-level basal area, canopy height, species composition, soil and ground-cover characteristics, and position within the urban-rural gradient. Urban forest growth was strongly related to regional meteorological drought. In periods of extreme drought conditions growth declined in the year of the drought (i.e., was not resistant to drought effects), but was highly resilient to drought in the subsequent 5 year period. Drought response did not vary consistently across land-use classes or among major genera, and site or community characteristics had little explanatory power in predicting drought response. Improved understanding of factors driving variation in urban forest growth and drought response could help inform adaptation-focused urban forest management strategies.

Urbanization and roads drive non-native plant invasion in the Chicago Metropolitan region

Human modification of the landscape, including urbanization and road construction, has facilitated the spread and establishment of non-native plant species. The effects of urbanization and roads are expected to be species-specific due to differences in species habitat requirements. We examined the influence of urbanization and roads on the occurrences of 16 non-native plant species in over 2000 wetlands within the Chicago metropolitan region in northeastern Illinois, USA. We found that species, or groups of species, responded differently to the effects of urbanization, roads, and proximity to conspecific populations. Occurrences of halophyte species were best predicted by road variables; halophytes were more commonly associated with major roads such as interstates and federal highways, road types that are likely to receive greater applications of de-icing salts. Several species were associated with proximity to Chicago. Proximity to Chicago may serve as a proxy for the degree of urbanization; or alternatively, may reflect a pattern of outward dispersal from an initial establishment point in the urban center. All study species were positively associated with distance to the nearest occupied wetland, implying that for each species, wetlands were more likely to be occupied if closer to other occupied sites. Our results support the need for species-specific understanding of responses to urbanization and roads to facilitate management of non-native species.