Landscape Architecture Master's Projects

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Browsing Landscape Architecture Master's Projects by Author "Dorkina, Natalie"

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    Ecological design of an urban meadow informed by contemporary approaches to lower-intensity management
    (University of Oregon, 2023-06) Dorkina, Natalie; Ribe, Rob
    Green spaces are an essential part of the urban environment. They should provide multiple benefits, including enhancing people’s well-being and affording ecological benefits. Rapidly changing economic conditions often lead to significant shortages of maintenance funding and skilled labor resources (Sutton 2022). This promotes a greatly disturbed urban environment due to neglect and climate change, and a decrease in biodiversity. The design of green spaces in the urban environment becomes more challenging. It was calculated that currently, potentially one hundred sixty-three thousand and eight hundred (163,800 km2 (± 35,850 km2) of land are cultivated with turf grasses in the continental United States, which is three times larger than any irrigated crop (Milesi et al., 2005). “A 2017 projection by the California Air Resources Board cautioned that, beginning in 2020, the most ubiquitous instruments of landscape care—gasoline-powered landscape maintenance equipment, —could generate more ozone pollution than all the cars in the state of California combined”(Sutton, 2022).One of the approaches to these challenges that is gaining more attention is to incorporate into more urban environment ecological planting with low-intensity management (Dunnett and Hitchmough 2004) such as meadow. My project seeks to design a pollinator meadow near the new site of the Urban Farm Riverfront as an alternative land cover type to mown amenities to increase the overall productivity of an ecosystem and create space for activities and exploration.