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Question: Urban Agriculture and Ecosystem Services: A Typology and Toolkit for Planners

Answer: This thesis makes the connection between urban agriculture and a specific suite of
ecosystem services and lays out a typology and toolkit for planners to take advantage of
these ecosystem services. The services investigated here are: food production, water
management, soil health, biodiversity, climate mitigation, and community development
benefits. Research from a variety of fields was aggregated and synthesized to prove that
urban agriculture can be beneficial for human as well as environmental health.
A set of urban agriculture typologies was generated to illustrate best practices to
maximize a particular set of ecosystem services. The typologies are: production farm,
stormwater garden, soil-building garden, habitat garden, climate mitigation farm,
cultural/educational garden, and ecosystem garden. Each typology was paired with a
precedent study to demonstrate how that typology might be realized in the real world.
Finally, a toolkit for planners was assembled to demonstrate some tools and
techniques that planners might use to implement urban agriculture as a strategy for
providing ecosystem services. Planners can utilize the toolkit to insert themselves into the
urban ecosystem at multiple scales in a creative way to apply best practices and urban
agriculture typologies in order to take advantage of the multiple benefits of urban
agriculture.

(Source: , 22 Sep 2021)

Source Link: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1259&context=masters_theses_2