Peer-reviewed Journal Articles

The Moore Center for Science at Conservation International is one of the world’s premier conservation research institutes, producing and applying groundbreaking and policy-relevant research to help decision-makers protect nature. To date, Conservation International has published more than 1,100 peer-reviewed articles, many in leading journals including Science, Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

On average, each of our scientific papers is cited more than 45 times by other scholars — a rate exceeding that of any other U.S. conservation organization as well as leading universities.

Here is an archive of our most recent research.

Science-design loop for the design of resilient urban landscapes

Nicolas Salliou, Tony Arborino, Joan Iverson Nassauer, Diego Salmeron, Philipp Urech, Derek Vollmer, Adrienne Grêt-Regamey

Socio-Environmental Systems Modelling, 5

February 14, 2023

Urban landscapes face significant challenges, as they must transform towards sustainability while remaining resilient. Urban landscape transformation is a complex task for landscape designers. They must not only create new solutions for landscapes but also ensure that their proposals are capable to deliver and maintain key ecosystems services over time and especially after shocks. In practice, designers must increase their dialogue with scientists and engineers to include expertise on ecosystems functions and services. Through science-design feedback loops, designers can be challenged by scientists’ models and simulations and thus create informed designs. Lastly, stakeholders also catalyse key steps of such a process, in particular by providing local expertise as well as co-constructing and validating the informed designs. In this paper, we introduce a roadmap, centred on an intensive interdisciplinary dialogue – a science-design loop. We illustrate the relevance of this roadmap with the analysis of five case studies about flood management and blue-green infrastructures. We analyse them according to the main steps of our roadmap and with the support of key interviews with experienced practitioners. First, this analysis provides an overview of best practices and challenges in the current urban landscape design world. But above all, we show the relevance of the proposed roadmap to muster science and design in a balanced manner in urban transformations.

CITATION

Salliou, N., Arborino, T., Nassauer, J. I., Salmeron, D., Urech, P., Vollmer, D., & Grêt-Regamey, A. (2023). Science-design loop for the design of resilient urban landscapes. Socio-Environmental Systems Modelling, 5, 18543. https://doi.org/10.18174/sesmo.18543