Ecological Principles of Landscape Management: Soils and the Processes That Determine Success of Landscape Designs, Farms and Plants

Copyright © 2013 by James P. Ludwig, Ph.D

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Rev. date: 12/20/2013

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TABLE OF CONTENTS.

Preface

Chapter 1. Basic Ecological Concepts for Landscapes and Soils.

Chapter 2. Fundamentals of Soil Structure and Chemistry.

Chapter 3. Soil Dynamics.

Chapter 4. Applying Ecological Principles and Knowledge of Soils to Sites or Projects.

Chapter 5. Maintaining Soil Health and Productivity of Farms.

Chapter 6. Hydrology and Stormwater Management.

Chapter 7. Very large landscape reclamation programs: Mines.

Chapter 8. Stormwater Management in Existing Exemplary Projects.

Chapter 9. The Ethics of Large-Scale Restorations.

LITERATURE CITED.

Appendices on wetland restorations by William E. Young, Landscape Architect

I. The Green Cay Wetland

II. The Brooklyn Union Gas Estuary Wetland Restoration

PREFACE

During the last decade many graduate-level Landscape Architecture students have taken our ecology classes tailored to their profession. However, relatively few students training to create attractive living spaces actually had significant basic fundamental knowledge of ecology, chemistry or soils. These deficiencies became apparent when elegant landscape designs failed because plants did not thrive, grew poorly or even died. Similarly, many farmers and gardeners are ill-equiped to understand the complexity of their soils, interpret soil testing data and appreciate natural soil processes affecting their crops. Other problems arise when storm water pulses in urban, suburban or farmed settings caused flooding, erosion or slope failures. These problems can be addressed successfully with basic knowledge of soils, soil mechanics, hydrology and ecology. Failure to appreciate the inexorable natural processes affecting soils increases the probability that a landscape plan—however elegant and aesthetically pleasing the design may be—or a crop will fail to grow and perform as expected.

Similarly, many friends and businesses we have evaluated had experienced repeated failures in the management of their home sites, commercial or industrial properties. The problems arising from the lack of this critical knowledge can be very expensive for the professional or individual. Repeated failures with inadequate plant performance prepared by a professional designer bode ill for a career. All too often, professionals have been replaced by the municipalities, corporations and developers who hired them after easily prevented failures emerged owing to inadequate basic ecological and soils training. For the individual land or business owner who tries to manage a difficult property, or if one has the proverbial ‘black thumb’, these failures lead to great personal frustration, a deep sense of inadequacy and abandonment of vision and goals. Sometimes owners simply opt for an engineered ‘hardscape’ that obliterates the ecological and natural values of a well-managed landscape. Farmers may see their incomes fall when seemingly intractable conditions develop. For the most part, these are preventable problems that can be avoided by sound ecological management and basic knowledge of how soils develop, interact and function with the plants they nourish in the local climate.

This book has been compiled to address the fundamental aspects of plant ecology and soils for the landscape professional, farmer and individual alike. However, it is not intended for the professional ecologist, soil scientist or agronomist. The most important aspects of these fields have been ‘cherry-picked’ and much was omitted for this book. Specialists will find this book incomplete and probably too generalized. Regardless, the principles of effective soils management for competent ecological designs are the same for the landscape designer, homeowner, organic gardener or farmer. In the 21st century, we can no longer afford to pay the replacement costs of failed plantings, or any sort of site repair or redevelopment. Resource depletion, the increasingly critical need to recycle lands including whole landscapes (especially in urban settings), and ever rising input costs for all forms of management support an argument for a practical manual that addresses the ecological fundamentals of good land and soil management at every level.

New concepts for land management emerge every day as economic stressors force every organization and professional to look at issues and ideas long forgotten such as gardening to raise a significant portion of minimally contaminated food by families living in urban and suburban settings. Our societies are changing rapidly. Human population densities continue to increase rapidly even as resources become ever more scarce and expensive. In one sense, we need to recapture a great deal of the common sense and knowledge that was lost after WW I when the majority of people left the land where they inherited the accumulated common sense knowledge of what works from their elders. Rarely did people know why a practice produced good results, just that it did. We must blend that traditional wisdom with newer knowledge generated by the science-based approaches of ecologists, engineers, hydrologists and agronomists. This information, blended with data from academics, the ecological and engineering disciplines can provide insight into the actual chemical and biological mechanisms that determine if management techniques and designs will be effective for a landscaped site, a garden or farm.

Ecology is a synthetic science, for it uses knowledge from many other sciences, especially chemistry and physics, thought by many (in error) to be studies of inanimate phenomena. The matter that makes up soils, precipitation and the atmosphere that plants use and depend upon for sustenance obey the principles described by the physical sciences, especially the behavior of elements and ions predicted by the periodic table and simple physical laws like gravitation, the physical behaviors of water and gasses, etc. Ecology integrates a fundamental knowledge of these chemical and physical phenomena with ecological processes. The biosphere interacts with these phenomena that conform to physical laws. The task is to learn and understand enough to be able to predict an outcome with a high probability of success for each situation we manage or site we design.

One of the great laws of ecology is that everything is linked to everything else and the corollary that you can never do just one thing in the real world. One may think of this as the ecological equivalent to the Heisenberg Principle of physics. The physical world affects plants and plants alter the physical reality of the places they live. Understanding how these interactions occur and what drives the processes involved is the essential basis of competent ecologically-driven landscape design, farming and all land management.

Although technical specialists in the ecological and soil sciences will find this effort an overly-broad interpretation of the details of their fields, this book seeks to give all persons, regardless of the level of training, a set of well-sharpened tools to predict outcomes of their management plans. The goal is to prevent expensive mistakes and to enhance the basic value of all forms of landscape management. Much of what is presented here is derived from proven designs that created pleasant self-sustaining landscapes, gardens and farms under adverse or challenging conditions.

Finally, we wish to acknowledge a number of consulting firms and companies whose example projects are included in this book. The firms include Applied Ecological Services, Inc. of Brodhead, WI, Ecological Research Services, Inc. of Ann Arbor, MI, Ecological Restoration Research & Consulting of Clementsport, NS, The Kestrel Management Group of Madison, WI, and Young Environmental, LLC of Jackson, NJ. Clients of these firms whose public projects have been described include Milwaukee, WI, New York City and Green Cay, FL. Privately built projects that were reviewed include the Flambeau Mine of Kennecott Copper Corporation at Ladysmith, WI, the Jackson County Iron Co. of Inland Steel Corporation at Black River Falls, WI, the MOSAIC fertilizer plant site at Lowbanks, ON, and the Prairie Crossing Conservation Development at GreysLake, IL.

Bill Young who has taught reclamation ecology to Landscape Architects at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, contributed two outstanding examples of restored wetlands in the appendices.

The photographs used in this book were supplied by Gene McColligan, Bill Young, David and Kim Hastings, Applied Ecological Services or the author.

To all these persons and entities we extend thanks for examples of what has worked well, what has failed, and why in large-scale landscape management.

James P. Ludwig Ph. D. at Fort Vermilion, Alberta, CANADA and William E. Young M.S. at Jackson, New Jersey, USA.

December 1, 2013.

I.

Basic Ecological Concepts for Landscapes and Soils.

The Ecological Paradigm.

M ost professional ecologists focus their work on natural, or less disturbed, communities and ecosystems. Ecology is dominated strongly by reductionism. Ecological systems are typically dissected into pieces and processes, then conceptually reassembled through models to predict outcomes. In a real sense, the practice of ecology is predicated on understanding the physical structures and chemistries in a place, the niches of resident and invasive species, and then to link all of this knowledge with the climate, soils and processes of the place under management. The art of ecology is expressed by the accuracy of predicted outcomes. Accurate predictions are difficult when pollutants, alien species, chemical and physical changes are inflicted on an ecosystem by humans.

Ecologists recognize that beautiful communities do occur in nature as one by-product of the interaction of a particular place with the resident species and natural physical and chemical processes. However, Mother Nature’s activities do not include an intrinsic appreciation of human aesthetics, even though aesthetics are undoubtedly derived largely from the natural world. Some natural communities are simply ugly. Few people will choose to live next to the natural volcanic mud pit suffused with hydrogen sulfide—the smell of rotten eggs—even though such places host a distinct, even valuable, ecological community that once dominated the entire earth! Rather, human concepts of beauty, aesthetics and designs are driven as much by our cultures as they are by natural processes and places. Similarly, more often than not, conventional agriculture is driven by the intent to make a living as easily as possible from cultivated or managed farm lands.

The (old) Landscape Architecture and Farming Paradigms.

The discipline of landscape architecture attempts to improve the human experience by designs imposed on a landscape, most often in a constructed, usually urban, context. The vast majority of commissions and jobs for landscape architects (LAs) are in the urban or suburban environment—a set of habitats that attract the interest of very few ecologists. The shapes, textures, accessibility, sight lines and functionality of a landscape for human-uses are the typical aesthetic and practical drivers of the landscape project, and become the criteria used most often to judge success among landscape architects. Final designs must address human aesthetics, needs, opportunities for use and budgets first.

Similarly, the old farming paradigm often pitted the farmer against an apparently hostile natural world intent on lowering the farmer’s yields and making life excessively difficult. In this mindset, farmers often see natural processes as a formidable, capricious set of challenges that must be overcome and dominated, subdued to their needs. Unkempt natural lands had to be broken, then tamed and brought into cultivation to be treated with herbicides and fertilizers to enhance yields. What processes were actually at work in soils or the environment were not believed to be important so long as yields were maintained or increased in the next growing season. Soils tend to be treated like bank accounts: Make an annual investment of inputs of fertilizers and chemicals, and later harvest and sell the crop as the principal, interest and a net economic gain.

The climate, physical, chemical and biological processes at play for landscape architects or farmers may receive scant attention, lip service or be ignored altogether by those who pursue these older paradigms. These are the very topics that should attract the attention of ecologists, but few respond to these opportunities given the temptations of work in the natural world where natural conditions dominate and the professional life is pleasant, quiet and rewarding.

Paradigms in conflict.

Individuals must create a coherent vision of artificial, human-friendly, urbanized or farmed landscapes and credit their own and the ecological paradigm simultaneously to be successful. When fundamental ecological realities are ignored in a design or on a farm, then disaster—driven by natural forces and processes—are invited into their projects or fields. An artificial, human-only focused ecosystem that violates ecological principles and processes is always under stress, cannot be self-sustaining and will require continuous intervention in the form of expensive active management. It will resist the goals of the designer or farmer and be expensive to maintain. Their goals and the source of monetary returns may be placed at risk.

This book is an attempt to explore the cognitive and real-world dissonance between classical ecology, landscape architecture, farming and other vocations focused on land management. The intent is to provide means to make partnerships between these disciplines less stressful, more productive and to move towards a more inclusive paradigm. Ecologists must recognize that urbanization, industrial uses and farming are the predominant ecological realities of modern life. Arguably, ecologists should refocus much of their effort toward those highly modified human environments instead of a focus only on the less-disturbed natural ecosystems where most ecologists now choose to work.

Landscape architects enjoy the trust of the public to improve human experiences in what is perceived to be a natural (or at least a naturalized) manner by most people. Farmers are equally respected for their work to make lands they manage productive of the food and fiber we all need. Improved sustainability and health of landscapes and farms should be the goal of all disciplines. There is a fundamental self-protection reason to consider this blind spot of the landscape architecture paradigm and conventional farming strategies. Simply put, design failures or ineffective farming practices will be criticized: worse, poor crop yields and soil erosion are expensive. In a world intolerant of repetitive failure, poor performance, or high intrinsic maintenance costs, those who design failing or overly expensive landscapes or farms will not prosper. Conversely, those who understand ecological principles sufficiently to avoid the hidden design or management flaws that result from natural processes and conditions always will enjoy a higher probability of long-term success and profitability. This short book attempts to provide tools that will assist everyone to be better managers of the limited precious resources that soils and managed lands really are. These are the very life support systems for all human, plant and animal life and deserve our most careful attention.

Ecological Principles I: Ecosystems and Limiting Factors.

Ecosystem! The very word evokes vague images of complex biological processes leading to a self-sustaining natural outcome. But, what is an ecosystem exactly, and how did this concept