Addressing the challenges of sustainable and equitable city management in the 21st century requires innovative
solutions and integration from a range of dedicated actors. In order to form and fortify partnerships of
multi-sectoral collaboration, expand effective governance, and build collective resiliency it is important to
understand the network of existing stewardship organizations. The term ‘stewardship’ encompasses a spectrum of
local agents dedicated to the evolving process of community care and restoration. Groups involved in stewardship
across Baltimore are catalysts of change through a variety of conservation, management, monitoring, transformation,
education, and advocacy activities for the local environment – many with common goals of joint resource management,
distributive justice, and community power sharing. The “environment” here is intentionally broadly defined as land, air, water, energy and more.
The Stewardship Mapping and Assessment Project (STEW-MAP) is a method of data collection and visualization
that tracks the characteristics of organizations and their financial and informational flows across sectors and
geographic boundaries. The survey includes questions about three facets of environmental stewardship groups:
1) organizational characteristics, 2) collaboration networks, and 3) stewardship “turfs” where each organization works.
The data have been analyzed alongside landcover and demographic data and used in multi-city studies
incorporating similar datasets across major urban areas of the U.S. Additional information about the growing
network of cities conducting stewmap can be found here: https://www.nrs.fs.usda.gov/STEW-MAP/
Romolini, Michele; Grove, J. Morgan; Locke, Dexter H. 2013. Assessing and comparing relationships between urban environmental
stewardship networks and land cover in Baltimore and Seattle. Landscape and Urban Planning. 120: 190-207.
Johnson, M., D. H. Locke, E. Svendsen, L. Campbell, L. M. Westphal, M. Romolini, and J. Grove. 2019. Context matters:
influence of organizational, environmental, and social factors on civic environmental stewardship group intensity. Ecology and Society 24(4): 1. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-10924-240401
Ponte, S. 2023. Social-ecological processes and dynamics of urban forests as green stormwater infrastructure in Maryland,
USA. Doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park, MD.
