Boulder’s commitment to ecological preservation by using local taxes to purchase and set aside public land has frequently been characterized as groundbreaking.
However, climate change, development of formerly vacant land and the use of systemic pesticides by farmers and homeowners have had impacts that require urgent action. That means environmental practices need to move beyond the preservation of land: In some cases, they need to fix the land.
“We need to develop a more integrated approach to monitoring ecosystem change,” said Brett KenCairn, senior policy advisor for Climate, Sustainability & Resilience for the city of Boulder.
To that end, Boulder will measure environmental degradation and simultaneously sustain or restore ecological health in three areas: land cover including the urban tree canopy, soil health and populations of pollinating and aquatic insects. Baseline measures in these areas will be in place when the 2021 TRENDS report is released and will be subsequently tracked by the Community Foundation as indicators.
Urban land cover: Boulder’s Urban Forester Kathleen Alexander calls the discovery of the Emerald Ash Borer in Boulder “a day I’ll never forget.“
“The scale of everything we do is different now,” she said. “We used to plant 300 trees a year. Now, it’s 500. We used to remove 400 trees. Last year, it was 1,300.”
That is only on city-owned land. About 75 percent of trees are on private property. The urban tree canopy currently covers about 16 percent of Boulder. The city’s goal is to maintain that percentage — an ambitious objective, given the high percentage of ash trees, all of which are susceptible to the borer.
Pollinators and aquatic insects: Rella Abernathy, integrated pest management coordinator for the city of Boulder, said the city does not use neonicotinoids, or neonics, a class of insecticides that is taken up through the plant’s root system and continues to expose pollinators through nectar and pollen.
“It kills insects over time. With pollinators, it can affect reproduction, make them more susceptible to disease, impact how they feed and their navigation ability,” Abernathy said. “They may not die immediately, but they are more likely to be eaten by a predator, because they are not behaving normally. It has cascading impacts throughout the entire food web and ecosystem.”
That includes fish and other aquatic creatures, since many insects spend their larval stage in water.
“Aquatic insects are important as more than food,” she said. “They clean and filter water, feed on sediment and algae … and get rid of decomposing plants.”
Abernathy added that homeowners often use a higher concentration of pesticides than most farms do. The runoff washes into storm sewers and, eventually, creeks.
The city is establishing pollinator havens on public property and encouraging homeowners to carve out space for pollinator gardens.
Soil health: One of the biggest concerns for the city is the degradation of some parcels of Open Space agricultural land caused by overgrazing and a burgeoning prairie dog population. The situation is so dire that some parcels of Open Space land can no longer be leased, because they are considered fallow.
In addition to working on a way to measure soil health such as looking at microbe populations, the city is working on soil restoration with an eye to finding the best practices for repairing land.
