The StoryMapper: Piloting a Traveling Placemaking Interface for Inclusion and Emplacement

As aresponse to traditional (top‐down) urban planning processes, placemaking engages local citizens in the process of shaping the form, social activity, and meaning of places around them. However, placemaking practices similarly face political challenges regarding inclusion and emplacement. These challenges relate to who participates, facilitation through linguistic discourse, and place engagement itself. Attempting to address these challenges, this article (based on a pilot study) reports on the design and deployment of the StoryMapper, a traveling placemaking interface that uses a participant‐driven “chain of engagement” recruiting process to invite participants to create emplaced “morphings” (i.e., visually produced stories superimposed on public space) to spark dialogue on a digitally facilitated living map. This pilot study took place within a larger placemaking project that engages citizens to share their ideas regarding the reconversion of a community church. Plugging the Storymapper into this larger project, we discuss preliminary findings relating to the role of placemaking facilitators in citizen‐driven recruitment and the role of multimodality in placemaking processes. This pilot study suggests that inclusion should not only be evaluated based on who participates and who does not, but also on how the tool itself, in its capacity to engage participants to visualize complex emplaced ideas, may facilitate inclusion of different publics

The Impact of Policy Instruments on Soil Multifunctionality in the European Union

peer-reviewedAgricultural ecosystems provide a range of benefits that are vital to human well-being. These benefits are dependent on several soil functions that are affected in different ways by legislation from the European Union, national, and regional levels. We evaluated current European Union soil-related legislation and examples of regional legislation with regard to direct and indirect impacts on five soil functions: the production of food, fiber, and fuel; water purification and regulation; carbon sequestration and climate regulation; habitat for biodiversity provisioning; and the recycling of nutrients/agro-chemicals. Our results illustrate the diversity of existing policies and the complex interactions present between different spatial and temporal scales. The impact of most policies, positive or negative, on a soil function is usually not established, but depends on how the policy is implemented by local authorities and the farmers. This makes it difficult to estimate the overall state and trends of the different soil functions in agricultural ecosystems. To implement functional management and sustainable use of the different soil functions in agricultural ecosystems, more knowledge is needed on the policy interactions as well as on the impact of management options on the different soil functions

ECOPLAN-SE: Ruimtelijke analyse van ecosysteemdiensten in Vlaanderen, een Q-GIS plugin

ECOPLAN-SE is een ruimtelijk expliciete tool (QGIS) voor het beoordelen van de impact van landgebruikveranderingen op de levering van ecosysteemdiensten. De ontwikkeling van deze tool kadert in het het SBO-project “ECOPLAN” (Planning for Ecosystem Services). ECOPLAN ontwikkelt ruimtelijk expliciete informatie en instrumenten voor de beoordeling van ecosysteemdiensten. Het ontwerpt instrumenten voor de evaluatie van functionele ecosystemen als een kostenefficiënte strategie om de landgebruiksefficiëntie en milieukwaliteit te verbeteren. Het ontwikkelt open source eindproducten voor het identificeren, kwantificeren, waarderen, valideren en monitoren van ecosysteemdiensten. Deze producten kunnen door administraties en consultants worden ingezet in projectontwikkeling, kosten-baten analyses, milieueffecten rapportering, etc

Assessment of Benefits of Conservation Agriculture on Soil Functions in Arable Production Systems in Europe

Conventional farming (CONV) is the norm in European farming, causing adverse effects on some of the five major soil functions, viz. primary productivity, carbon sequestration and regulation, nutrient cycling and provision, water regulation and purification, and habitat for functional and intrinsic biodiversity. Conservation agriculture (CA) is an alternative to enhance soil functions. However, there is no analysis of CA benefits on the five soil functions as most studies addressed individual soil functions. The objective was to compare effects of CA and CONV practices on the five soil functions in four major environmental zones (Atlantic North, Pannonian, Continental and Mediterranean North) in Europe by applying expert scoring based on synthesis of existing literature. In each environmental zone, a team of experts scored the five soil functions due to CA and CONV treatments and median scores indicated the overall effects on five soil functions. Across the environmental zones, CONV had overall negative effects on soil functions with a median score of 0.50 whereas CA had overall positive effects with median score ranging from 0.80 to 0.83. The study proposes the need for field-based investigations, policies and subsidy support to benefit from CA adoption to enhance the five soil functions.Unión Europea 635201Unión Europea 652615Unión Europea 68927

Exploitation des chemins de fer

info:eu-repo/semantics/published

The Impact of Policy Instruments on Soil Multifunctionality in the European Union

Agricultural ecosystems provide a range of benefits that are vital to human well-being. These benefits are dependent on several soil functions that are affected in different ways by legislation from the European Union, national, and regional levels. We evaluated current European Union soil-related legislation and examples of regional legislation with regard to direct and indirect impacts on five soil functions: the production of food, fiber, and fuel; water purification and regulation; carbon sequestration and climate regulation; habitat for biodiversity provisioning; and the recycling of nutrients/agro-chemicals. Our results illustrate the diversity of existing policies and the complex interactions present between different spatial and temporal scales. The impact of most policies, positive or negative, on a soil function is usually not established, but depends on how the policy is implemented by local authorities and the farmers. This makes it difficult to estimate the overall state and trends of the different soil functions in agricultural ecosystems. To implement functional management and sustainable use of the different soil functions in agricultural ecosystems, more knowledge is needed on the policy interactions as well as on the impact of management options on the different soil functions