Kansas City (Mo.) Star December 11, 2005 NEW TURF FOR SCIENCE: SUBURBIA By Glennda Chui, Knight Ridder Newspapers SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Suburbia may be familiar turf, but it's one of the last frontiers for scientists trying to understand how ecosystems work and how people are changing the natural world. From the woodsy suburban enclaves of Vermont to sprawling Chico, Livermore and Gilroy [in California], researchers are starting to probe the role of lawns in global warming, how garden fertilizers and pesticides affect wildlife and how storm water running from roofs, roads and driveways undermines the health of streams. "The suburban landscape is large, and it's growing," said Jennifer Jenkins of the University of Vermont, one of the scientists who reported her findings last week at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. "There's this enormous land surface that's falling through the cracks." Jenkins is involved in a study of 40 suburban yards near Baltimore. Researchers will clip plots of lawn by hand, weigh the clippings, measure the grass stubble and thatch and even rake up leaves for analysis. The goal is to see how much carbon dioxide the lawns absorb and give off, and whether they're contributing to global warming or slowing it down. Others are trying to figure out how to design suburban neighborhoods that do less damage to their surroundings. "We're trying to think about ways to use ecological engineering, green engineering approaches, to solve the problem at its source," said Breck Bowden, also of the University of Vermont. From a scientific standpoint, it's hard to even define what suburbia is. It slowly grades from sprawling tract housing on the fringes of cities to homes on half-acre lots to the "exurbs" or "ruburbs" - scattered homes on mostly rural land. Ecologists have cut their teeth on studies of forests and bogs, deserts and tundra and rain forest, but only recently did they turn to suburbia. Maybe that's because people-dominated landscapes are so complicated and always changing, Jenkins said; maybe they're just less exotic places to work. But the 'burbs have a big impact. For instance, of all the carbon stored in trees in Maryland, only about two-thirds is in forests; the rest is in trees planted in yards and median strips, Jenkins found in an earlier study. That impact is bound to grow. Suburbs are among the fastest-growing land covers in the United States and in the world, said Daniel Bain of the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif., one of the organizers of last week's sessions. One of the first things that happens when people develop farm fields or wild lands is that they pave over parts of it. A study last year found that more than 43,000 square miles of the United States is paved or built upon, an area roughly the size of Ohio. As a result, rainwater that once would have trickled through the soil gets into streams a lot faster, Bain said. The rushing water scours the banks, cutting the streams deeper and sweeping away habitats for plants, animals and bugs. It doesn't take much surrounding pavement to severely damage a stream, Bowden said. Even if 15 percent or 20 percent is paved -- typical for a medium-density suburb -- "you have severe degradation," he said. "We're essentially pounding them to death with excess water." For wildlife, the suburbs are a mixed blessing. Some animals manage to thrive and even become pests: Garden-wrecking deer. Garbage-raiding raccoons. Squawking crows and blue jays. Coyotes, black bears and mountain lions drop by some California neighborhoods, stealing food and scaring residents. Yet many others are driven away or wiped out. On balance, suburbia's rapid spread is probably the biggest threat to the diversity of wildlife in the developed world, according to a 2003 review by Stephen DeStefano of the U.S. Geological Survey and Richard DeGraaf of the U.S. Forest Service. Fertilizers are also a problem, running off lawns and gardens into streams and eventually into the sea. While it might seem like a good thing to give wild plants a dose of fertilizer, the results are often disastrous, said Lawrence Band of the University of North Carolina. The nitrogen in fertilizer triggers algae blooms in the ocean. When the algae die, sink to the bottom and rot, they use up the oxygen in the water, resulting in "dead zones" that kill fish and other wildlife. Studies from Santa Barbara to Maryland's Chesapeake Bay are trying to track down the sources of nitrogen contamination and find ways to slow it. The cost of restoring Chesapeake Bay alone is estimated at $18 billion, Band said. Ultimately, scientists hope their findings will filter into designs for better neighborhoods. They might include paving materials that let some of the water seep into the ground, rain barrels that catch the runoff from gutters, or even sod roofs like the one being installed at the new California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. "We have to be patient," Bowden said. "It's taken us 100 years to get into this state of having messed things up. It's going to take us a little time to recover." Copyright 2005 KRT Wire