Northeast Ohio Ecosystem Consortium: 
Scientific research at the edge of cities and nature

The Northeast Ohio Ecosystem Consortium (NEOECO) is a group of environmental and social scientists, natural resource management professionals, urban planners, and landscape designers who have joined together to: 

• Investigate the relationships among environmental and social factors that determine the health, vitality, and well-being of urban communities. 
• Provide expert scientific and technical guidance for the protection of the region’s valuable natural amenities and for the sustainable revitalization of distressed urban communities and habitats.

The people of Cleveland and Northeast Ohio have long benefitted from natural amenities that provide economic vitality, support environmental quality, promote human health, and provide opportunities for recreation and spiritual renewal. These assets include valuable water resources and remarkable networks of parks and natural areas perhaps unparalleled for a major North American city, including one of the very few National Parks in a suburban-urban setting.

However, the region faces current and future threats to the quality and long-term viability of these resources. In suburban and rural areas, development and sprawl are fragmenting natural lands, reducing biodiversity, and contributing to pollution of air, land, and water resources. Within the city, land and water resources have degraded because of a legacy of industrial pollution, inadequate infrastructure for storm and wastewater management, as well as limited budgets for management and restoration. Over 50 years of social and economic uncertainty and decline, including the current foreclosure crisis, have reduced the population of Cleveland by half and left many neighborhoods fragmented and burdened by abandoned, vacant, and foreclosed properties. Additional uncertainty arises from the potential for complex interactions of our regional challenges with broader scale aspects of environmental change, such as climate change and invasive species.

Hence, the partners forming NEOECO – all of whom have worked on these issues for many years – have joined together at this critical time to bring energy and focus to the considerable, but somewhat dispersed, intellectual assets within the region.  

Follow the links below for more information.