Cities are ecosystems. An ecosystem is the sum of interactions and relationships between biotic and abiotic components of the environment. This includes plants, animals, microbes, rain, sun, pavement and soil, all of it. Even the city of Syracuse is an ecosystem.

We’ve all felt the force of Syracuse — scrambling to cover exposed skin from fierce winds, finding stray cats slinking around on garbage night and crushing worms that creep onto sidewalks when the ground is soggy.

Examining cities as part of a living system puts environmental health in a new light. The water quality of a lake can be measured using turbidity, temperature and dissolved oxygen; all of which play a role in whether the lake is healthy.

But taking counts of populations, like a species of fish or insects, shows how well that ecosystem is functioning. A body of water could appear pristine but have too low of a pH from acid rain to support aquatic life. This will show in the population counts, and fish don’t lie.

Humans direct how different resources, like water, move through urban ecosystems. Many older cities like Syracuse have a combined sewer system. This means storm water sewers and municipal wastewater are connected. During major storm events, the sewer system is overwhelmed and raw sewage goes into storm sewers instead of going to the treatment plant. Clogged storm sewers back up this noxious concoction onto the streets. Every time the intersection of Lancaster Avenue and Euclid Avenue floods, I wonder if the drunken frolickers should be more concerned about the E. coli or lead content of the water.

Last Friday, some classmates and I wandered the Northside of Syracuse to evaluate it for an ecosystem restoration project. It was 40 degrees and raining, miserable weather to be walking in, but highly representative of life in Syracuse.

My team was looking to get a feel for the neighborhood and a sense of the existing ecosystem. Many of the buildings had peeling paint, but most of the homes still looked lived in and cared for. We took note of parks with mature trees, boarded up buildings with their street number spray painted orange on it and children’s garden next to a playground.

We found a park without a name on Lodi Street. It had large grassy areas and a defunct cemetery tucked into the eastern edge. The cemetery looked abandoned, and after closer inspection, no one had been buried there in more than 100 years. The whole park was on a gentle hill facing west. Being exceedingly mature, more than one of us jumped to the conclusion that this would be a banging sledding hill.

After some debate, we decided to leave the cemetery portion untouched — neighbors would probably not appreciate us disturbing the graves across the street from their homes to plant trees. The humans and environmental conditions in an area need to be in sync for a restoration project to be successful.

Interdisciplinary urban ecosystem restoration fosters more comprehensive designs. Landscape architects see green spaces for recreation, engineers want to implement rain gardens that encourage infiltration, biologists geek out over squirrel populations and policy wonks hash out the details of zoning laws.

Despite all of the gray, Syracuse is alive.

Leanna Mulvihill is a senior forest engineering major and environmental writing and rhetoric minor. Her column appears every Tuesday. She can be reached at lpmulvih@syr.edu or followed on Twitter at @LeannaMulvihill 

Published on January 30, 2012 at 12:00 pm