Over the past several years, however, the park has benefited from more attention, both from the city’s Parks Department and from the Friends of Beaver Ponds Park, which was established in 1997. The community group, in turn, has requested and received help from Yale’s Urban Resources Initiative, a program of F&ES’ Hixon Center for Urban Ecology, whose purpose is to “foster community-based land stewardship, promote environmental education and advance the practice of urban forestry.”

This year, for the first time, students participating in the urban module—now in its third year—joined the Beaver Ponds park restoration effort. Gaboury Benoit, professor of environmental chemistry and co-director of the Hixon Center with Colleen Murphy-Dunning, described the urban Mod as “fostering understanding of cities as ecosystems.”

“Studying the ecology of cities,” Benoit says, “is a newer field; it means positing a new kind of environment, intrinsically different from forests or savannas or plains.

“For a long time,” he added, “research tended to focus on ‘the pristine system with human disturbance added, ’ but people influence their environments in complex ways that go beyond just being a disturbance. The point of the urban Mod is to explore that perspective, using a variety of methods and tools. New Haven is an ideal laboratory because it is a typical urban ecosystem.”

Throughout the four days of the urban Mod, students were introduced to several of those tools. Marcia Cleveland, a Yale Law School graduate who began practicing environmental law in the mid-1970s and returned to school to update her knowledge of science and policy, said, “Probably most fun was the geographic information systems training.” GIS, a computer-based tool that teaches students how to take human census data and depict it spatially, was used by Cleveland and her classmates to map the area around Beaver Ponds Park, examining such questions as: Who lives near the park? Who would use it and what kind of use would you expect, considering factors such as age, income and cultural background? For example, how might the needs of young families differ from those of elderly residents? How could data gleaned from GIS be used to help a community group “own” this land—to both enjoy and care for it?

Sarah Enders’ favorite experience was an afternoon spent at the New Haven County Historical Society, using another tool geared to understanding an urban ecosystem—historical documentation. “I am fascinated by maps from the 1850s, which showed streets, property boundaries, housing developments and the appearance and disappearance of roads,” she says. Enders graduated from Yale College in 2006 with a degree in geology and geophysics and is in the F&ES fifth-year program. “I had lived in New Haven for four years as an undergrad but, looking at that material, I’ve begun to get a sense of how an urban landscape evolves over time.”

Students also used several of the more traditional methods of ecological study, including plant identification and water sampling, the latter done at three tributaries of the West River: the main branch, Wintergreen Brook and the Beaver Ponds outlet. “Each of these sites represents a different level of development,” says Benoit. “There are no surprises—the water near the most developed area, the Beaver Ponds outlet, has the worst quality. But this exercise exposes students to a variety of tests and tools that they will be using throughout their time here, such as using meters with probes to determine temperature and pH; colorimetrics, in which chemical agents are added to a sample and an evaluation is made based on changes in color intensity, to determine nitrate levels; and titration (adding agents to a sample and observing degrees of reaction) to test for alkalinity.”

To hone their observational skills, the students trudged through surrounding neighborhoods, gathering information about the size of homes, condition of sidewalks, presence of street lighting, and thickness of the green canopy, among other things. “In a forest,” says Murphy-Dunning, “we would be measuring occurrences of specific natural phenomena. In an urban environment, we’re looking at variables that tell us something about the relationship between biophysical and socioeconomic phenomena.”

The students at Beaver Ponds Park yanking vines, sawing branches and hauling trash were preparing an area of the park for the planting of native species—red and white cedar, viburnum, among others, all the while building a community amongst themselves. “There is no more important work than engaging people, so that they can be active and positive stewards of their own environment.”