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Principles of Ecological Landscape Design
Today, there is a growing demand for designed landscapes—from public parks to backyards—to be not only beautiful and functional, but also sustainable. With Principles of Ecological Landscape Design , Travis Beck gives professionals and students the first book to translate the science of ecology into design practice.
This groundbreaking work explains key ecological concepts and their application to the design and management of sustainable landscapes. It covers topics from biogeography and plant selection to global change. Beck draws on real world cases where professionals have put ecological principles to use in the built landscape.
For constructed landscapes to perform as we need them to, we must get their underlying ecology right. Principles of Ecological Landscape Design provides the tools to do just that.
This groundbreaking work explains key ecological concepts and their application to the design and management of sustainable landscapes. It covers topics from biogeography and plant selection to global change. Beck draws on real world cases where professionals have put ecological principles to use in the built landscape.
For constructed landscapes to perform as we need them to, we must get their underlying ecology right. Principles of Ecological Landscape Design provides the tools to do just that.
296 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 2013
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July 20, 2022I haven't finished the book yet, but since it's dense I am writing thoughts as I go along.
The introductory chapters have pretty familiar information for me, but I was prompted to start this review by what I see as a significant misinterpretation of the data on the subject of species richness. The book cites two research projects on this topic, one that measures productivity by measuring the standing mass of vegetation and organic litter on the soil, and one using fertilization as a proxy measure for productivity. The conclusion in both cases was that the greatest species diversity occurs in areas of moderately low productivity.
I won't go as far as to say it's not true, but it's undoubtedly a non-sequitur. Both of these measures of productivity are seriously flawed. First of all, biomass in itself is a proxy measure for sequestered solar energy, but there are different molecules out there that sequester that energy with different amounts of weight. Specifically, fats are more than twice as energy dense per unit of weight compared to carbohydrates. And while you could argue that having plants that store more fats as compared to carbohydrates for energy makes only a marginal difference, what is undoubtedly missing from a study that counts the mass of the standing crop is the changes in biomass of animals who feed on the crop throughout the growing season. Imagine a diverse meadow planting of wildflowers, mobbed by birds who pick the fatty seeds out of the seed heads, and the rodents and rabbits who nibble the greenery but disappear when the researchers show up to do the measuring, or the insects who suck the sap of the plants and leave.
There's also the little question of what to do about mass that WAS sequestered as plant mass or animal flesh but then metabolized and respired back into the atmosphere.
This unmeasured biomass is relevant in all plots, but to what degree? Is it possible that "highly productive" systems, as measured by counting the weight of the remnant plant matter alone, are confounded by the palatability of those plants to animals whose mass does not get counted? Or perhaps even the absence of animals who have adapted to feed on the given plant, such as the bison? Imagine the vast American tallgrass meadows being measured on their standing plant mass after a herd of bison has just grazed through. "Low productivity this year!"
Also, measuring what's above ground ignores what's below the ground, and what's below the ground is vastly important when you're talking about biomass and specifically when you're talking about the effect of inorganic nitrogen fertilizers. In many soils, the bottleneck to plant growth is a limitation in available nitrogen compounds, but this limitation also affects the microbes who metabolize organic matter in the soil to grow and reproduce. By adding nitrogen and widening that bottleneck, one permits much more of the organic matter under the soil surface to be consumed and respired as CO2 back into the air. Sure, there is a burst of plant growth (at least in the few years after fertilizing has begun), but there is a concomitant reduction in soil organic matter. Measuring what is above without measuring what's below will bias the result by creating more measurable biomass at the expense of unmeasurable biomass. In a word, the productivity measure is confounded.
The book makes some mention that fertilizer salts will acidify the soil, so that could also contribute to a lack of species diversity at "higher levels of productivity," but that's not the only effect of fertilizers that can explain some of the observed effect of reduced species richness in fertilized fields. Fertilizers can also be toxic to life in the soil, and it's possible that some plant species require favorable soil conditions in order to germinate and survive, such as those that benefit from certain mycelial arrangements or those that rely on the actions of insects to bury their seeds or reduce the vigor of their competitors.
Another concern is whether an observable specimen of a growing plant at a given observation time really means that the species is "not there." There is a seedbank in the soil, and many species are ephemeral and opportunistic. In my American tallgrass meadow, indeed in the height of summer the meadow will be almost entirely composed of C4 grass species and relatively less species-rich. This condition may persist for years. But does this mean that the wildflowers are really absent? In my scenario where the bison suddenly graze the area, these wildflowers may suddenly germinate, or the ones that had germinated but were soon to be outcompeted and die off may get the opportunity to grow and set seed. Has the productivity changed? If the researchers had counted the species present over the previous set of years, would they have concluded that these opportunistic species were not present in this plot?
This may seem like splitting hairs and picking nits, but I don't think so. Ecological conclusions can be confounded at any step by the complexity of categorizing observations that are either in flux or only approximations of the truth. "Present" and "not present" are not so simple to decide as they first appear. Even a concept like a "species" can be a matter of debate. In my yard, I grow Amsonia illustris. Or wait, is it Amsonia tabernaemontana var. illustris? Depends on who you ask, but what if both of these "species" are appearing together in the same area? How many species do you have?
I bring this all up because the book mentions that in order to create a diverse species-rich meadow environment, it might be wise to reduce the fertility of the site such as by, for example, removing the topsoil layer to reach a less-fertile soil stratum. What?!? Is this a serious suggestion from a book that has "ecological landscape design" in the name?
Maybe it was a joke and I just haven't read to the punchline yet, but I fear that such an insane idea on the basis of some very limited observations about species richness does not bode well for the level of consideration applied to recommendations in the rest of the book.
---
Final review:
I found this book to be odd, and not what I thought I was getting into.
I took a career advancement test in project management one time, and the information the exam tested was organized as essentially a list of lists to be memorized. I can't even remember where to begin now, but it was something like:
The five steps of project management scope identification, budgeting, build-out, testing, iteration. There are four elements of scope identification: problem definition, solution space analysis, project risk analysis, consensus-gathering. Within problem definition there are 3 major concerns, they are X, Y, Z.
And so on such that project management was essentially a hierarchy of 2200 some list items, with a characterless name for any task that a project manager might do, but with no wisdom at all about how to successfully manage projects to completion.
And this book felt like that too often. "Edge habitats can be wide or narrow. They can be straight or tortuous. They can be perforated or contiguous. They can be perpendicular to prevailing energy flows or parallel to them." Etc.
The book goes on and on about the various aspects of landscape design that one could consider, usually offering a single example of some of the considerations recently mentioned and then the chapter ends.
I felt that I was already aware of the vast majority of the various design concerns that the book lays out, and therefore, since it didn't contain blinding insights into ecology that demonstrated the shallowness of my understanding, and it didn't lay out profound wisdom about how to manage the known information to great effect in one's personal projects, I didn't have much use for it.
Depending on how much information you're bringing in or how deeply you've already considered landscape design questions from an ecological point of view, you may disagree with me, finding the considerations laid out to be illuminating or the design ideas as they are to be plenty of wisdom to go on for some time.
Probably I had mistaken expectations going in. I bought the book at Mt. Cuba botanical gardens, and based on a skim-through which revealed a diagram of energy movement through a landscape that included a spot for phytoplankters, I expected that the book would get a lot more deeply into the fundamentals of ecology and practices of ecological amelioration in landscape designing.
But it doesn't take that angle on the question. The book considers landscape design first, and treats ecology as a way to support the vision of the designer. Salient ideas from studies in ecology, which seem self-evident (but I guess it makes sense to double-check), form the basis for somewhat vague and flippant recommendations about how to proceed in planting out a landscape and maintaining it. I couldn't believe that late in the book, the author asked us to recall back to chapter 2 when he cited information to prove that in a larger area, there will be more species than in a small area. I guess such an assertion is not quite a tautology, but it's darn close. In another experiment, researchers gassed a bunch of insects on a mangrove island and waited to see which ones arrived back first. "Strong fliers" got there first.
Not to belabor the point, but what kind of information is this? It's not altogether useless, but it comes up well short of being insightful.
The introductory chapters have pretty familiar information for me, but I was prompted to start this review by what I see as a significant misinterpretation of the data on the subject of species richness. The book cites two research projects on this topic, one that measures productivity by measuring the standing mass of vegetation and organic litter on the soil, and one using fertilization as a proxy measure for productivity. The conclusion in both cases was that the greatest species diversity occurs in areas of moderately low productivity.
I won't go as far as to say it's not true, but it's undoubtedly a non-sequitur. Both of these measures of productivity are seriously flawed. First of all, biomass in itself is a proxy measure for sequestered solar energy, but there are different molecules out there that sequester that energy with different amounts of weight. Specifically, fats are more than twice as energy dense per unit of weight compared to carbohydrates. And while you could argue that having plants that store more fats as compared to carbohydrates for energy makes only a marginal difference, what is undoubtedly missing from a study that counts the mass of the standing crop is the changes in biomass of animals who feed on the crop throughout the growing season. Imagine a diverse meadow planting of wildflowers, mobbed by birds who pick the fatty seeds out of the seed heads, and the rodents and rabbits who nibble the greenery but disappear when the researchers show up to do the measuring, or the insects who suck the sap of the plants and leave.
There's also the little question of what to do about mass that WAS sequestered as plant mass or animal flesh but then metabolized and respired back into the atmosphere.
This unmeasured biomass is relevant in all plots, but to what degree? Is it possible that "highly productive" systems, as measured by counting the weight of the remnant plant matter alone, are confounded by the palatability of those plants to animals whose mass does not get counted? Or perhaps even the absence of animals who have adapted to feed on the given plant, such as the bison? Imagine the vast American tallgrass meadows being measured on their standing plant mass after a herd of bison has just grazed through. "Low productivity this year!"
Also, measuring what's above ground ignores what's below the ground, and what's below the ground is vastly important when you're talking about biomass and specifically when you're talking about the effect of inorganic nitrogen fertilizers. In many soils, the bottleneck to plant growth is a limitation in available nitrogen compounds, but this limitation also affects the microbes who metabolize organic matter in the soil to grow and reproduce. By adding nitrogen and widening that bottleneck, one permits much more of the organic matter under the soil surface to be consumed and respired as CO2 back into the air. Sure, there is a burst of plant growth (at least in the few years after fertilizing has begun), but there is a concomitant reduction in soil organic matter. Measuring what is above without measuring what's below will bias the result by creating more measurable biomass at the expense of unmeasurable biomass. In a word, the productivity measure is confounded.
The book makes some mention that fertilizer salts will acidify the soil, so that could also contribute to a lack of species diversity at "higher levels of productivity," but that's not the only effect of fertilizers that can explain some of the observed effect of reduced species richness in fertilized fields. Fertilizers can also be toxic to life in the soil, and it's possible that some plant species require favorable soil conditions in order to germinate and survive, such as those that benefit from certain mycelial arrangements or those that rely on the actions of insects to bury their seeds or reduce the vigor of their competitors.
Another concern is whether an observable specimen of a growing plant at a given observation time really means that the species is "not there." There is a seedbank in the soil, and many species are ephemeral and opportunistic. In my American tallgrass meadow, indeed in the height of summer the meadow will be almost entirely composed of C4 grass species and relatively less species-rich. This condition may persist for years. But does this mean that the wildflowers are really absent? In my scenario where the bison suddenly graze the area, these wildflowers may suddenly germinate, or the ones that had germinated but were soon to be outcompeted and die off may get the opportunity to grow and set seed. Has the productivity changed? If the researchers had counted the species present over the previous set of years, would they have concluded that these opportunistic species were not present in this plot?
This may seem like splitting hairs and picking nits, but I don't think so. Ecological conclusions can be confounded at any step by the complexity of categorizing observations that are either in flux or only approximations of the truth. "Present" and "not present" are not so simple to decide as they first appear. Even a concept like a "species" can be a matter of debate. In my yard, I grow Amsonia illustris. Or wait, is it Amsonia tabernaemontana var. illustris? Depends on who you ask, but what if both of these "species" are appearing together in the same area? How many species do you have?
I bring this all up because the book mentions that in order to create a diverse species-rich meadow environment, it might be wise to reduce the fertility of the site such as by, for example, removing the topsoil layer to reach a less-fertile soil stratum. What?!? Is this a serious suggestion from a book that has "ecological landscape design" in the name?
Maybe it was a joke and I just haven't read to the punchline yet, but I fear that such an insane idea on the basis of some very limited observations about species richness does not bode well for the level of consideration applied to recommendations in the rest of the book.
---
Final review:
I found this book to be odd, and not what I thought I was getting into.
I took a career advancement test in project management one time, and the information the exam tested was organized as essentially a list of lists to be memorized. I can't even remember where to begin now, but it was something like:
The five steps of project management scope identification, budgeting, build-out, testing, iteration. There are four elements of scope identification: problem definition, solution space analysis, project risk analysis, consensus-gathering. Within problem definition there are 3 major concerns, they are X, Y, Z.
And so on such that project management was essentially a hierarchy of 2200 some list items, with a characterless name for any task that a project manager might do, but with no wisdom at all about how to successfully manage projects to completion.
And this book felt like that too often. "Edge habitats can be wide or narrow. They can be straight or tortuous. They can be perforated or contiguous. They can be perpendicular to prevailing energy flows or parallel to them." Etc.
The book goes on and on about the various aspects of landscape design that one could consider, usually offering a single example of some of the considerations recently mentioned and then the chapter ends.
I felt that I was already aware of the vast majority of the various design concerns that the book lays out, and therefore, since it didn't contain blinding insights into ecology that demonstrated the shallowness of my understanding, and it didn't lay out profound wisdom about how to manage the known information to great effect in one's personal projects, I didn't have much use for it.
Depending on how much information you're bringing in or how deeply you've already considered landscape design questions from an ecological point of view, you may disagree with me, finding the considerations laid out to be illuminating or the design ideas as they are to be plenty of wisdom to go on for some time.
Probably I had mistaken expectations going in. I bought the book at Mt. Cuba botanical gardens, and based on a skim-through which revealed a diagram of energy movement through a landscape that included a spot for phytoplankters, I expected that the book would get a lot more deeply into the fundamentals of ecology and practices of ecological amelioration in landscape designing.
But it doesn't take that angle on the question. The book considers landscape design first, and treats ecology as a way to support the vision of the designer. Salient ideas from studies in ecology, which seem self-evident (but I guess it makes sense to double-check), form the basis for somewhat vague and flippant recommendations about how to proceed in planting out a landscape and maintaining it. I couldn't believe that late in the book, the author asked us to recall back to chapter 2 when he cited information to prove that in a larger area, there will be more species than in a small area. I guess such an assertion is not quite a tautology, but it's darn close. In another experiment, researchers gassed a bunch of insects on a mangrove island and waited to see which ones arrived back first. "Strong fliers" got there first.
Not to belabor the point, but what kind of information is this? It's not altogether useless, but it comes up well short of being insightful.
May 24, 2017
This is the book I wish I had written, done better than I would have achieved. This book is not exactly a how-to guide for the home landscaper, but rather a clear, concise introduction to the ecological principles (hence the title) to be considered should you want to create a more sustainable landscape. Reading this book took me back to my time as an ecology grad student, one of my favorite periods in my life. This book energized me as I begin to thoroughly renovate my own small urban yard.
February 25, 2013
Had to return to library. Get again.
An in-depth, readable, exciting treatment of the subject.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews