Landscape Architecture Theses and Dissertations

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Browsing Landscape Architecture Theses and Dissertations by Author "Hulse, David"

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    A Landscape Approach to Ecosystem Services in Oregon's Southern Willamette Valley Agricultural Landscape
    (University of Oregon, 2013-07-11) Enright, Christianne; Hulse, David
    Over the past decade, ecosystem services has become a familiar term. Definitions vary but the central idea is that society depends on and is enhanced by earth's resources. Concerns about natural resource depletion and degradation have motivated researchers to move from concept to operation and real-world change. Since the late 1990s, attention has been directed at characterizing the monetary value of ecosystem services to influence decision-making processes. This research has been dominated by the disciplines of ecology and economics with the underlying assumption that the integration of these disciplinary approaches will provide the necessary operational pathways forward. The perspectives of ecology and economics are crucial but the unique qualities of ecosystem services suggest the need to consider other approaches and a willingness to look beyond existing models and disciplinary boundaries. I propose a landscape approach to ecosystem services in which they play a role in the intentional coevolution of social/ ecological systems. I apply this approach to explore the potential for floodplain agricultural landscapes to provide ecosystem services in a 65,000 acre study area located in Oregon's agriculturally-dominated southern Willamette Valley. The landscape's biophysical processes are represented by three ecosystem services: non-structural flood storage, carbon sequestration and floodplain forest. These are quantitatively evaluated using a geographic information system. One aspect of the landscape's sociocultural processes is explored through qualitative interviews with farmers and profiles of the crops they commonly grow. The biophysical and sociocultural research components are integrated through an alternative futures framework to compare the ca. 2000 landscape with a 2050 future landscape in which agricultural production includes ecosystem services. In the 2050 landscape, the synthesis results show where all three ecosystem services are simultaneously provided on 2,981 acres, and where increases in carbon sequestration and floodplain forest are simultaneously provided on an additional 4,841 acres. For the identified acres, the annual income from present-day conventional crop production is provided as a first approximation of the monetary income that farmers would consider for producing ecosystem services.
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    Open Space as an Armature for Urban Expansion: A Future Scenarios Study to Assess the Effects of Spatial Concepts on Wildlife Populations
    (University of Oregon, 2014-06-17) Penteado, Homero; Hulse, David
    Urbanization is one of the biggest threats to biodiversity. To address this problem, landscape planners have increasingly adopted landscape ecology as a theoretical basis for planning. They use spatial concepts that express principles of landscape ecology in diagrammatic form to create frameworks for planning. This dissertation presents a quantitative approach to evaluate the application of spatial concepts developed to create an armature of open space in areas subject to urbanization. It focuses on the predicted urban expansion of Damascus, Oregon, as a case study. An alternative futures study was used to test three open space spatial concepts for patches, corridors and networks in combination with compact and dispersed urban development patterns. The resulting eight scenarios of land use and land cover were then modeled for the year 2060 to evaluate their effects on habitat quantity, quality and configuration and to identify tradeoffs between urban development and conservation for three focal wildlife species: Red-legged frog, Western meadowlark, and Douglas squirrel. Open space spatial concepts strongly influenced habitat quantity and quality differences among future scenarios. Development patterns showed less influence on those variables. Scenarios with no landscape ecological spatial concept provided the most land for urban development but reduced habitat quantity and quality. Greenway scenarios showed habitat increases but failed to provide sufficient habitat for Western meadowlark. Park system scenarios showed habitat increases, but high-quality habitats for Western meadowlark and Red-legged frog decreased. Network scenarios presented the best overall amount of habitats and high-quality habitats for the three species but constrained urban development options. Next, I used an individual-based wildlife model, HexSim, to simulate the effects of habitat configuration and to compare and contrast resulting wildlife population sizes among the eight future scenarios with the ca. 2010 baseline landscape. Network scenarios supported the largest number of Red-legged frog breeders. Park scenarios performed best for meadowlarks, while greenway scenarios showed the largest populations of squirrels. Four of the eight scenarios sustained viable populations of Western meadowlarks. Compact development scenarios performed best for most indicators, but dispersed development scenarios performed better for Western meadowlarks. This dissertation includes both previously published and unpublished material.