This spring, five University of Virginia faculty members will offer four courses in Environmental Sciences,  Architecture, History, and Landscape Architecture that investigate the benefits of rural landscapes for ecosystem stability and public health and explore how to measure, value, preserve, and protect those benefits.

These benefits, known as “ecosystem services,” may be environmental (such as the value of mature forests for carbon sequestration) or cultural (such as the aesthetic and educational values of rural landscapes).

Faculty offering these courses will use the University of Virginia’s Morven Farm as a laboratory for their research. In 2001, philanthropist John W. Kluge gave the real estate to the University of Virginia Foundation for educational and charitable purpose. The 7,379-acre gift, valued in excess of $45 million, more than doubled the University’s land holdings. To date, some 3,000 acres remain of that original gift have been conserved for research purposes.

In addition to individual class sessions, the four classes will meet together once a week for team-taught programs and guest lectures by UVA colleagues Jon Cannon and Leon Szeptycki (Law), George Overstreet (Commerce), Jeff Hantman (Anthropology), and others.

The joint class sessions will sometimes meet at Morven, and all the classes will have access to Morven as needed for on-the-ground research of rural landscape issues, said Stewart Gamage, director of U.Va.'s Morven Project. 

With these coordinated courses the faculty team will collect preliminary data and refine hypotheses for a multi-year research project that, for the first time, will provide land-use planners and land-owners with tools for enumerating and measuring the ecosystems services provided by a preserved rural landscape.

Understanding these ecosystems services as goods with particular values—and understanding the coupling of environmental and social history—is especially critical to more adequate approaches to watershed conservation. Like the UVA Bay Game, an innovative agent-based simulation of the Chesapeake Bay watershed, this rural landscape project will open new directions for private and public sector solutions.