New Research and Teaching Initiative in Ecosystems Services and Rural Landscapes

Spring 2010

• Hank Shugart (in collaboration with Manuel Lerdau) will teach ENVSC4559, section 21622, “Accelerating Landscape Succession in Virginian Piedmont Forests.”

• Bill Sherman will teach ALAR 702/802, a graduate architecture design studio on adapting the built environment for sustainability.

• Scot French will teach HIUS 4993, “Morven Farm: The Rural Virginia Landscape as Social and Cultural History Site.”

In addition to individual class sessions, the four classes will meet together once a week for team-taught programs and guest lectures by UVA colleagues Jon Cannon and Leon Szeptycki (Law), George Overstreet (Commerce), Jeff Hantman (Anthropology), and others.

This innovative curriculum is coordinated by the Office of the Vice President for Research, as part of an ongoing multi-disciplinary research program in sustainability. It builds on a spring 2009 course, cosponsored by the Morven Project, the School of Architecture, and the VP for Research and led by Richard Price, that conducted an initial inventory of natural and cultural resources within the 3,000 acre Morven landscape. In the summer of 2009 Jeff Hantman (Anthropology) led the University Field School Program and an extensive 1,956 shovel test pit survey at Morven.

With these coordinated courses the faculty team will collect preliminary data and refine hypotheses for a multi-year research project that, for the first time, will provide land-use planners and land-owners with tools for enumerating and measuring the ecosystems services provided by a preserved rural landscape.

Understanding these ecosystems services as goods with particular values—and understanding the coupling of environmental and social history—is especially critical to more adequate approaches to watershed conservation. Like the UVA Bay Game, an innovative agent-based simulation of the Chesapeake Bay watershed, this rural landscape project will open new directions for private and public sector solutions.

For further information, contact Jeffrey Plank, Associate VP for Research, 434-924-6901 or .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).