Saving the ground beneath our feet: Establishing priorities and criteria for governing soil use and protection

The continual loss and impairment of soil ecosystem services (SES) across the globe calls for a fundamental reconsideration of soil governance mechanisms. This critical synthesis charts the history and evolution of national and international soil law and seeks to unravel certain challenges that have contributed to this failure in governance. It describes and categorizes law and policy responses to different soil threats, and identifies a worrying widespread absence of legislation for oversight and protection of agricultural soils from urbanization, as well as a lack of clear legal mechanisms to determine national priorities for soil protection. A reduction in the world's prime farmland threatens SES, including food security, carbon storage and biodiversity. Falling between the stalls of agricultural and environmental law, the fate of farmland is often left to planners who do not see themselves as responsible for soils. Consequently, legal instruments with the greatest power to affect soil, sometimes irreversibly, are often framed and worded with little or no reference to the soil. Nevertheless, emerging conceptual frameworks might offer positive outcomes. The authors advocate robust holistic policies of soil governance and land use planning that place SES and natural capital at the heart of decision making.

Barn Adaptation: A Proposal To Protect Rural Architecture

The countryside that surrounds the Greater Toronto Area possesses a significant amount of Canada's prime farmland. However, to accommodate urban growth, this precious resource is being converted to provide urban developments. The area of interest for this thesis is the rural-urban fringe, a zone of transition between working farms, rural communities and urban residential developments. The developments that are built in this area illustrate a common development approach, the elimination of all obstacles, including farmland and rural architecture. This thesis introduces the concept of an alternative approach for suburban development, one that presents a compromise between rural and urban needs. At the heart of this concept is the design project, the adaptive reuse of a barn that serves as a tool to communicate the unique qualities of these monumental buildings. It also identifies the need to rethink suburban development approaches to include the preservation of rural architecture and prime farmland.

Barn Adaptation: A Proposal To Protect Rural Architecture

The countryside that surrounds the Greater Toronto Area possesses a significant amount of Canada's prime farmland. However, to accommodate urban growth, this precious resource is being converted to provide urban developments. The area of interest for this thesis is the rural-urban fringe, a zone of transition between working farms, rural communities and urban residential developments. The developments that are built in this area illustrate a common development approach, the elimination of all obstacles, including farmland and rural architecture. This thesis introduces the concept of an alternative approach for suburban development, one that presents a compromise between rural and urban needs. At the heart of this concept is the design project, the adaptive reuse of a barn that serves as a tool to communicate the unique qualities of these monumental buildings. It also identifies the need to rethink suburban development approaches to include the preservation of rural architecture and prime farmland.

A System to Evaluate Prime Farmland Reclamation Success Based on Spatial Soil Properties

Scholars, governmental agencies, and concerned citizens are interested in developing empirical predictive models to quantitatively assess the vegetative productivity potentials of reconstructed soils (neo- sols). This research presents equations for a northern Michigan mining region in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, based on data derived from the National Resources Conservation Service. We employed principal component analysis to develop models to predict the vegetative productivity of corn, corn silage, oats, alfalfa/hay, Irish potatoes, red maple (Acer rubrum L.), white spruce (Picea glauca [Moench] Voss), red pine (Pinus resinosa Aniton), eastern white pine (Pinus strobus L.), jack pine (Pinus banksiana Lamb.), and lilac (Syringa vulgaris L.). Soil attributes that were examined in this research include: available water holding capacity, moist bulk density, % clay, % rock fragments, hydraulic conductivity, % organic matter, soil reactivity, % slope, and topographic position. Four predictive equations based on landscape topography have been developed and are described as an all-mesic woody plant and crop equation, a xeric equation, an equation specific to jack pine, and a wet environment equation. The models were highly significant (p<0.0001) and explained 87.93%, 74.52%, 65.33%, and 87.68% of the variation in site productivity of the respective landscape setting. These equations are intended to assist in efforts to assess the vegetative productivity potentials of reconstructed soils on post-mined landscapes and other disturbed landscapes.

An RP-MCE-SOP Framework for China’s County-Level “Three-Space” and “Three-Line” Planning—An Integration of Rational Planning, Multi-Criteria Evaluation, and Spatial Optimization

“Three-space” (including agricultural space, urban and rural construction space, and ecological space) and “three-line” (including urban development boundary, prime farmland control line, basic ecological control line) planning has been regarded as an essential measure for China’s city and county level “multiple-plan integration”. It handles the multiple planning objectives of development management, agricultural land preservation, and ecological resource protection. This article proposes a rational planning with multi-criteria evaluation and spatial optimization (RP-MCE-SOP) framework for China’s county-level “three-space” and “three-line” planning by following the rational planning (RP) model and taking advantages of multi-criteria evaluation (MCE) and spatial optimization (SOP) techniques. The framework includes five steps of building the SOP model, land suitability evaluation with MCE, optimization problem solving, post-processing of land allocation solutions, and applying post-processed solutions to “three-space” and “three-line” planning. The framework was implemented in Dongxihu District of Wuhan City with the Boolean aggregation and analytical hierarchy analysis (AHP) MCE techniques and the patch-based Non-dominated Genetic Algorithm (NSGA-II) SOP algorithm. The case study shows: (1) The framework is feasible and useful for assisting decision making in “three-space” and “three-line” planning. (2) The planning solutions protect ecologically sensitive spaces and high-quality agricultural land and plan future construction in the urban peripheral area or transportation convenient areas. (3) The solutions are useful for planning the hard boundaries for ecological resource protection and prime farmland preservation and setting both hard and soft boundaries for urban growth.