People or place? Neighborhood opportunity influences community garden soil properties and soil-based ecosystem services

Abstract

Soils are the foundation for cultivating ecosystem services in urban agriculture. Yet, variations in socio-environment characteristics of urbanization leads to variable soil properties and unequal distribution of ecosystem services like soil fertility. Thus, examining relationships among biophysical features and social dimensions of urban agricultural systems is necessary to understand soil functioning variation and to develop urban agricultural systems that promote equitable ecosystem service provisioning. In 25 urban community gardens in California, we examined two links between soil properties and neighborhood socio-demographics: (1) how groundcover management affects soil properties; and (2) how socio-demographics (and in particular, social advantage) can affect groundcover management and soil properties. We found that mulch groundcover improves soil fertility and water holding capacity in gardens, and that socio-demographic factors may affect people's access to mulch to affect soil properties: neighborhoods with measures of higher mobility (e.g., greater vehicle availability), but measures of poorer public/environmental health (e.g., poorer health care access) had more soil organic matter, higher soil nutrient content, and greater water holding capacity. However, we found indicators of high functioning soils in the absence of mulch, indicating that other factors like social networks and organizational support may be important for urban agricultural ecosystem services.

Global urbanization and food production in direct competition for land: Leverage places to mitigate impacts on SDG2 and on the Earth System

“…Arguably, regional zoning policies may be an effective tool to guide land-use-considerate urban expansion (Bhatta 2010;Viljoen and Wiskerke, 2012). Soil quality is, however, rarely considered a resource in the governance of land in urban landscapes (EEA, 2015), which is one reason for involving inhabitants in UPA (Egerer et al, 2018). Investing in the management of healthy functioning soils is a basic principle of UPA (De Neergaard et al, 2009), not least since the main limitation of UPA is the availability and access to land.…”

Water Use Behavior, Learning, and Adaptation to Future Change in Urban Gardens

“…For the analysis (section Self-Reported Watering Data and Stated Influences on Watering Behavior), we selected only one soil variable due to significant correlation among soil properties. We chose the soil organic matter content (%) because it not only had the best fit for the model and was correlated to other soil properties (e.g., WHC), but many participants reported that they use mulch and compost in their plots which is likely reflected in the soil organic matter content in this system (Egerer et al, 2017).…”

A Systematic Review Protocol Investigating Community Gardening Impact Measures

“…This happens by reducing the rough patches like abandoned lands for living organisms [37]. Soil-based ecosystem services such as soil fertility and quality are another benefit provided by community gardens [38]. Climate regulation could be one of the benefits of community gardens in urban settings if the gardens are designed in a scale to contribute to the urban green infrastructure to provide such benefits [39].…”