Laura Musacchio

Opening People’s Senses and Reconnecting Them to Everyday Nature and Nearby Nature

Good urban and regional forms is needed more than ever to provide better access to all people to experience urban and regional nature and to benefit ecosystem services. In addition, the more conscious use of space for biodiversity and the web of life helps them to flourish in urban and regional environments.

One of Dr. Musacchio’s major concerns is poorly designed urban and regional environments that have little emphasis on biophilic and biocultural sensations, emotions, thoughts, and meanings. Dr. Musacchio works mainly on how to successfully integrate different types of greening approaches (e.g., biophilic design, biocultural design, wildlife-friendly gardens, rewilding, ecological restoration, and urban agriculture) into sustainable open space systems that include public and private lands. Her training in systems theory, landscape architecture, ecological design, landscape planning, and urban & regional landscape ecology allow her to consider this topic from multiple scales—from the yard, street, and neighborhood to the city, watershed, region, country, and planet.

Her interests focus on how to enhance people’s experiences of nature as well as improving how other species experience human-influenced landscapes. She is especially concerned about how contemporary lifestyles and the design of cities, towns, and regions tend to disconnect people, biodiversity, and the web of life from deep nature experiences rather than reinforce them. This situation is a major concern when extreme environmental change has the potential to shift urban and regional landscapes into ones that are less suitable to support people, biodiversity, and the web of life. Her work emphasize how to turn this situation around by finding new ways to rethink the design of cities, towns, and regions through the deeper integration of biophilic thought and practice.

Teaching and Mentoring Activities

Dr. Musacchio teaches several courses at the undergraduate and graduate level in these topics, and she encourages students to develop an interdisciplinary perspective that facilitates the integration of science and art in their thoughts and practices. She facilitates classroom experiences to help students explore the pluralistic meanings of ecology, culture, biophilia, and biodiversity in their studies. Students from a variety of disciplines take her courses including landscape architecture, architecture, urban design, conservation biology, natural resources, urban and regional planning, public policy, sustainability, humanities, and the arts.

Her faculty affiliations at the University of Minnesota include the Conservation Sciences program in the College of Food and Natural Resource Sciences at the University of Minnesota. In the past, she was also affiliated with the Urban and Regional Planning Program and the Water Resource Sciences Program. She was selected to be a summer internship mentor in 2022 for the Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program at the University of California Santa Cruz, which seeks to diversify leadership in the conservation fields by developing the next generation of leaders among undergraduate students. In addition, she was selected to be a member of the University of Minnesota Graduate School Advisory Board from 2022 to 2025.

Examples of Projects in Her Research Portfolio

One of the key questions of her research is: How do people's experiences of urban nature influence their values, attitudes, beliefs, and knowledge about nature conservation and their relations with plants, wildlife, and water? This key question motivates Dr. Musacchio to discover what plants, wildlife, and water mean to people when they experience urban and regional green spaces. She is intrigued by people's interactions with different types of urban nature (or urban natures) in green infrastructure, urban forests, remnant habitats, gardens, and so on. When people transform the landscapes that they live and work in, they create different types of urban nature depending on what the web of life and biodiversity means to them. She is very interested in these research topics: (1) how people reconnect to green spaces as a way to reduce stress and improve well-being; (2) how people's values, attitudes, beliefs, and knowledge influence their relationships with ecosystem services and disservices, biodiversity, food, and water; and (3) how changes in weather and climate might shift people's understanding of nature, biodiversity, water, and the web of life.

Her current research projects emphasize (1) finding new ways to integrate biophilic and biocultural sensations, emotions, thoughts, and meanings into the sustainable design of homes, neighborhoods, cities, and metropolitan regions; (2) examining how biophilic design, biocultural design, rewilding, and ecological restoration might be used to conceptually rethink and redesign regional and urban landscapes for public health, biodiversity, and ecosystem services; and (3) the theoretical, conceptual, and applied connections between sustainable landscapes and landscape sustainability.

Her portfolio of research projects also includes a diverse range of interdisciplinary work. Her research projects include participation on an interdisciplinary research team—funded by NASA—that investigated how city size and shape influenced severe weather, urban pollution, and canopy transition patterns in the Great Plains. Her work with this project looked at bridging land change science to green infrastructure practice for sustainable and resilient metropolitan regions. Her fellowship at Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota investigated the topic of boundary management as an approach in the sciences to better connect theory and application in planning, policy, management, and design.

Other Activities

Her research has been published in journals such as Landscape and Urban Planning, Landscape Journal, Landscape Ecology, and Urban Ecosystems. She has presented her research in Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Finland, Germany, Mexico, the Netherlands, and New Zealand. She has also worked on international design and planning projects.

She is an editorial board member of Landscape and Urban Planning and Landscape Architecture Frontiers. In addition, she was an editorial board member of Landscape Ecology and Biodiversity and Conservation. She is currently a member of the American Society of Landscape Architects, Association of the Collegiate Schools of Planning, International Association of Landscape Ecology, and the Society for Urban Ecology.