Observational research indicates that cannabis production is likely to affect wildlife space use

One major limitation of our approach to interpreting detection as a combination of detectability and space use intensity is that the two are not entirely separable. We have included covariates that we believe address one aspect more than the other, but there could be unaccounted for detectability variables that confound our interpretation of space use intensity. More caution should therefore be taken when interpreting the detection results compared to the occupancy results. Future studies might be able to help disentangle some of these effects by examining temporal activity patterns of wildlife in addition to space use intensity. Finally, these data are all observational, and therefore cannot address specific mechanisms by which cannabis may affect local wildlife. Future studies isolating potential mechanisms of deterrence and attraction would help elucidate some of the species-specific behaviors documented in this study . Understanding the pathways by which wildlife respond to disturbance is critical for mitigating the impacts of anthropogenic change . It is well understood that wildlife respond to human disturbance in complex ways, which can have individual, population, and community effects . To piece apart these complex interactions, it can be useful to isolate particular sources of disturbance and their effects on wildlife. Two sources of disturbance that have been identified as major anthropogenic drivers of wildlife behavioral change are light and noise pollution. Artificial light at night is an increasing global phenomenon, with the coverage of outdoor areas illuminated by artificial light increasing by 2.2% per year . This global increase in light can have far ranging consequences across taxa, including by causing animal disorientation, and by disrupting behavior or interactions . Noise pollution has been less studied than light pollution, however, the effects of noise on wildlife are also global, and may have individual, population,pots for cannabis plants and community level impacts including disrupted reproductive signaling or prey vigilance, and added cumulative stress . Controlled experiments provide a powerful tool for exploring causal relationships between disturbance sources, such as light and sound, and wildlife responses . Experiments on noise and light effects are typically focused on individual species or taxa, but field experiments in particular offer an opportunity to study interactive effects of noise and light pollution.

However, this approach is largely under-utilized, due to the logistical challenges of implementing such studies . Here, I describe an experimental approach to studying the separate and interactive effects of point source noise and light pollution on multi-taxa wildlife communities. Specifically, my approach applies a comprehensive experimental design to understand the effects of noise and light pollution commonly associated with cannabis farming. Recreational cannabis production in the western United States has been increasing rapidly following state-level legalization . Influenced by its illicit history, outdoor cannabis is often grown in remote and bio-diverse regions with minimal other non-timber agriculture . In these legacy systems, the proximity of cannabis to wilderness areas may lead to unusual disturbance patterns associated with cannabis cultivation where relatively small point source disturbances are surrounded by a matrix of more intact vegetation . Outdoor and mixed light cannabis farming presents a particular concern for environmental impacts because of their use of bright lights and loud equipment such as generators and fans .However, current research has not distinguished between sources of disturbance on cannabis farms, which is critical for designing appropriate interventions, including policy, to mitigate the effect of these disturbances. In this study, I designed and implemented an experiment to investigate the individual and combined effects of light and noise from cannabis farms on local wildlife. I was particularly interested in the impact of new developing farms in rural areas. To approach this question, I designed a series of experimental field trials that mimic light and sound disturbance from outdoor, greenhouse, and mixed light cannabis production, and a monitoring array to measure resulting wildlife responses. The preliminary results of this effort to design and trial a comprehensive study of anthropogenic noise and light effects on wildlife are promising. Results to date suggest that this experimental design may be sufficiently rigorous, with enough sampling to quantify relationships and thresholds for different taxonomic groups in their response to experimental light and noise treatments that mimic conditions on cannabis farms.

While more data needs to be collected, sorted, and analyzed, the study design detailed here may be sufficient for this study’s objectives and useful for other researchers interested in community responses to disturbance. Preliminary visualizations indicate that there will likely be species- and taxa- specific responses to each disturbance treatment. These results provide an early indication that I may be able to capture fairly fine-scale responses of at least medium-large mammals and flying insects. Current results mainly provide insights on response to light treatments, since there were fewer sound and combined light/sound trials in the first season of data collection. Considering I have not yet implemented more complex modeling to account for seasonal variations or other covariates, it is surprising that there is already an indication of mammalian avoidance and flying insect attraction to light treatments, providing limited support for hypothesized relationships. Future analysis of these data will involve more complex Generalized Linear Mixed Model approaches, as has been used in other studies on light and noise effects on wildlife . This will allow me to account for seasonal variation or other covariates, examine potential habituation effects over time, and incorporate decibel and light intensity measurements at each site. One of the most widespread consequences of the use of new materials in ever more airtight buildings may be the so-called Sick Building Syndrome . SBS is a rather poorly defined term referring to a set of nonspecific skin, mucous membrane, neurological, respiratory, and generalized symptoms experienced by people working in nonindustrial environments in the absence of a known causative agent; these symptoms diminish or disappear during absences from these work environments . These introductory comments are made with the understanding that the vast majority of so-called SBS outbreaks have been shown secondary to discrimination bias, secondary gain, or both. However, a number of important illnesses can occur in very air-tight buildings. With the recognition that such nonspecific symptoms are reported in almost all office buildings, as well as in schools, libraries, hospitals, homes for the elderly, and apartments,cannabis flood table they are increasingly referred to as building-related symptoms. This can be somewhat misleading because the terms “building related symptoms” and “building-related illness” used to be reserved for symptoms with identified causes . Confusion can be avoided by distinguishing between nonspecific and specific building-related illnesses. For the sake of simplicity, we use the term SBS for the nonspecific symptomatology experienced by occupants of nonindustrial buildings.

SBS symptoms most commonly are general or neurophysiological or affect mucous membranes, the upper and lower respiratory systems, or the skin. General symptoms include headache, dizziness, nausea, mental fatigue, difficulty in concentrating, and lethargy. Upper respiratory and mucosal symptoms consist of dry, itchy, sore, burning, or otherwise irritated eyes, nose, sinuses, or throat, whereas lower respiratory symptoms include cough, wheeze, difficulty breathing, and chest tightness. Red, dry, or itchy skin is the most common dermatological manifestation. The prevalence of SBS symptoms ranges between a few percent and 50 to 60%; additionally, with 70% of US workers employed in nonindustrial indoor settings , SBS constitutes one of the most common environmental health issues . The economic impact of productivity losses and health care costs has been estimated to amount to $50 to $100 billion, of which $5 to $75 billion is potentially preventable by using the appropriate measures . Appropriate measures are currently difficult to identify because the underlying causes of SBS remain largely unknown, although it has been associated with a large variety of factors, including building, work environment, demographic, and personal characteristics . One finding has clearly emerged from the studies analyzing these associations: the etiology of SBS is multi-factorial, arising from complex interactions between chemical, physical, biological, and psychosocial factors . The ventilation rate is one of the work environment features most consistently associated with SBS symptoms. From a review of the literature, a multidisciplinary group of European scientists concluded that ventilation rate was strongly associated with perceived air quality, SBS symptoms, and various other health outcomes such as inflammation, infections, asthma, allergy, and short-term sick leave . The data also showed that increased ventilation was associated with enhanced productivity. Previous reviews had indicated that there was an increased risk of adverse health effects at outdoor airflow rates lower than 10 L/s and that perceived air quality improved and SBS symptoms decreased with higher ventilation rates in most studies . The minimum ventilation rate set by the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air Conditioning Engineers is 10 L/s per person. However, European scientists concluded that the risk of SBS symptoms increased at outdoor air-supply rates lower than 25 L/s per person . Note that increasing the outdoor air supply can result in deterioration of indoor air quality if outdoor pollutants are insufficiently filtered by the ventilation system. Indoor carbon dioxide concentrations are often used as a surrogate not only for occupant-generated pollutants but also for ventilation rate per occupant. However, CO2 concentrations in occupied buildings usually do not reach steady state, and for this and various other reasons, CO2 concentrations may not accurately reflect ventilation rates .

Nonetheless, the results of studies investigating the association of CO2 concentrations with SBS symptoms are generally similar to those obtained with ventilation rates. Analysis of data from 41 of 100 US office buildings studied in the Building Assessment Survey and Evaluation undertaken by the US Environmental Protection Agency indicated a dose–response relationship between the average workday indoor minus average outdoor CO2 concentrations and sore throat, nose or sinus symptoms, tight chest, and wheezing . The adjusted odds ratios per 100 ppm dCO2 ranged between 1.2 and 1.5. When the analysis was extended to the whole set of 100 buildings, however, many of the previously reported associations were not evident, and the ORs for sore throat and wheeze were reduced to 1.15 and 1.21, respectively . The rather consistent observation of a significant negative association between ventilation rate or CO2 levels and SBS symptoms suggests that irritating compounds arising from indoor sources play a causative role in these symptoms and that the removal, or at least dilution, of such chemicals should result in a decrease of reported symptoms. It has long been suspected that volatile organic compounds are important contributors to SBS, but conclusive evidence is lacking. The VOCs may not be responsible for the SBS symptoms; rather, the products of their reaction with ozone and other chemicals may trigger the symptoms. Ultrafine particles, which can act as strong airway irritants, are one example of these reaction products. Particulate matter from various sources is another possible causative agent of SBS symptoms, especially because it has been associated with respiratory symptoms in healthy and asthmatic subjects. Two other groups of chemicals known to cause some of the symptoms of SBS, phthalates and pesticides, have received surprisingly little attention in attempts to identify agents involved in SBS. However, they should be an important focus of research, given their large-scale production and use, their known adverse effects in experimental animals, and the growing concern that they, along with other environmental exposures, have contributed to the increasing incidence of certain symptoms and diseases in humans and wildlife. These other exposures include persistent organochlorine compounds that were widely produced and used in the 1960s and 1970s, before researchers realized that they accumulated in the environment and in various biota to the extent that they caused serious adverse effects on wildlife and humans. Their permanence ensures that humans will be exposed to them for generations to come. Therefore, it is important to fully understand their health effects and, above all, their interactions with the myriad of other pollutants we produce and are exposed to in ever-increasing amounts in the air, food, water, dust, soil, and everything we come in contact with.VOCs are compounds that contain at least one carbon and one hydrogen atom, participate in atmospheric photochemical reactions, and have a low boiling point , which means they readily vaporize at room temperature. Formaldehyde is sometimes designated as a VOC, but it is not truly a VOC because it is a gas at room temperature. Because it also requires different analytical techniques, it is not as routinely measured as VOC.

There was widespread confusion and frustration with the regulations around recreational cannabis

Farmers mentioned the need for more crop research, information-sharing, and stronger norms around acceptable environmental practices. While this theme did not translate easily into quantifiable spatial proxies, we focused on farmers’ expressed desire to grow in remote areas because of the opportunity to work the land in proximity to wild flora and fauna. We quantified this ruralness using the Human Footprint layer, which combines data on the built environment, population density, night-time lights, crop and pasture lands, roads and railways, and navigable waterways to create an index of direct and indirect human pressures at a 1 km2 resolution. We extracted the mean human impact value for each parcel using the exactextractr package in R . In the quote above, the farmer explained how some aspects of regulation were more impactful to his daily farm management decisions than others as he navigated the licensed industry. Most farmers did not perceive that enforcement influenced their land use decisions, although the farmers navigating the licensed recreational market said that regulations were often their first consideration. One unlicensed farmer compared law enforcement to wildfire risk, explaining both as factors that were constant background risks but ultimately outside of his control.Multiple farmers said that they started growing hemp, or had considered growing hemp, to avoid the legal hurdles of recreational cannabis. Others raised questions about what the new recreational market would mean for medical producers. Some interviewees mentioned that a rural location made things easier from an enforcement perspective, particularly in avoiding the Grants Pass area . Even those who were attempting to navigate the legal industry expressed that it was useful to be less closely monitored because of the difficulty in complying with all regulations, the time needed to demonstrate compliance, or fear that they may be breaking rules without knowing it. To translate the preference for distance from law enforcement into a spatial driver,vertical grow shelf we estimated this both with ruralness as well as the straight line distance from the Grants Pass Sheriff’s office to each parcel using the sf package in R . However, because these measurements were significantly correlated, we ultimately dropped distance to law enforcement as a variable in our models.

There were also a number of regulatory designations that cannabis farmers discussed as important when considering where to grow. Water rights and zoning were some of the most frequently mentioned. Water rights were considered critical for legal production but specifics of parcel-level rights were often hard to acquire or interpret. Water rights were not generally discussed by unlicensed farmers, but water access, storage, and application were all considered critical. Because of the mixed response to regulated water use, we assessed water access as part of Parcel Qualities below, rather than in Regulation. The shifting policies in Josephine County around zoning restrictions, particularly for Rural Residential zones, led farmers to identify exclusive farm zoned parcels as the safest and highest quality lands for cannabis production. One farmer also mentioned Farm Resource zoned properties. To translate this into a land use driver, we created a binary variable that assigned a ‘1’ to each parcel that was zoned for either EF or FR zones and a 0 for those that did not. Zoning information was provided by Josephine County . Farmers identified multiple biophysical properties of parcels that factored into decisions about where to produce cannabis. In the quote above, the farmer was expressing confusion as to why some cannabis producers selected parcels that required a large labor input to clear or terrace land to begin farming, when other, more open parcels seemed to him to be a more ideal choice. In addition to open/cleared areas with access to sunlight, some of the other factors mentioned included relatively flat slopes, and medium elevation zones as helpful qualities for production. Several interviewees mentioned that the climate in Josephine County was ideal for cannabis, while others expressed the belief that it was primarily grown in the region because of history and culture. One farmer mentioned that owning versus renting land for cannabis farming might change the relative importance of the physical factors of a parcel that a farmer prioritizes, as might living on the property where they are growing, but they weren’t sure how often producers rented versus owned their farms.We translated the above biophysical parcel qualities into multiple spatial drivers. First, we grouped land cover classes into a binary variable based on ease of clearing for crops. We included the following classifications in the easy to clear category, based on land cover descriptions: Developed Low Intensity, Grassland/Herbaceous, Developed Open Space, Pasture/Hay, Barren Land, and Cultivated Crops.

In addition to clearing, we created a binary variable to describe if the majority aspect of a parcel was southern-facing, to reflect parcels with greater sunlight access, using the raster package in R. We also used maximum elevation per parcel to capture elevation as a potential limiting factor, using a 10 m DEM and the exactextractr package in R . We calculated maximum roughness to capture potential preference for overall flat parcels using the ‘terrain’ function in the raster package in R . In the raster package, roughness measures the difference between the maximum and minimum elevation value of a cell and its surrounding cells. Farmers discussed parcel size as a potential factor that could influence where to locate a cannabis farm. One farmer mentioned that parcels in Josephine County were smaller than in other regions where he had farmed cannabis, while other farmers implied that they had looked for larger parcels within the county. Multiple farmers discussed the importance of space on the property, whether directly for cannabis production , multiple kinds of cannabis production , or for other reasons, for example to provide a treed buffer or space for a fence between the farm and its neighbors, to have enough room for setback distances required by regulation, or to accommodate other land uses on the same parcel . To translate this into a spatial driver, we used the calculated area of each parcel polygon using the sf package in R. Not all farmers interviewed operated licensed production sites, and many were in a “gray zone” of legality, and so for some, proximity to water on a parcel was more important than specific water rights. Most farmers mentioned that in 2016, regulations on cannabis farming were not yet enforced, and so access to water at that time point might have had more to do with physical parcel qualities than legal access. Because of this, we used proximity of farmed parcels to water as a spatial driver instead of specific water rights on a given parcel for our model. We used the NHDplus flowlines database, filtering to include rivers and streams, as well as artificial paths . We then calculated distances using the sf package in R . While some farmers mentioned that soil quality mattered to them when selecting a site, most said that existing soil was not a primary concern for them, or for most farmers that they knew. Instead, most reported that the industry standard was to grow with imported soils in grow bags or boxes. Some farmers did report growing in native soil, but that they still had to add amendments to do so. Given the mixed comments on soil quality, we did not include this as a potential spatial driver of cannabis grow indoor land use.While all farmers interviewed discussed the difficulties of supporting themselves or their families economically in the cannabis industry, none of them specifically mentioned land prices as a factor in their decision making, and we did not ultimately include any drivers based on this theme. In the quote above, the farmer expressed that it was difficult to make a secure living with cannabis farming, which often made it risky to attempt new sustainable techniques. In this case, the farmer was also explaining that in their own attempts to grow with lowered environmental impacts in mind, it sometimes meant an income trade off. Thus, farmers reported that economics primarily influenced their decisions on specific land use practices, as well as whether or not to enter the licensed market. The farmers did see broader drivers of supply and demand being important for the industry as a whole, but for their individual decisions, economics was influential in deciding how much to grow, how much to spend on equipment or labor, how to balance different types of production , or when they might have to leave the industry altogether. Most expressed that the industry, both licensed and unlicensed, was full of uncertainty, and economic vulnerability. Many expressed concerns that when operating under economic uncertainty, farmers were unlikely to take a risk on more sustainable or less ecologically-impactful farming practices.

All interviewed farmers said that the cannabis farming industry had expanded with legalization, and expressed concerns or uncertainty for the future of the industry. In the quote above, the farmer was looking at their own long history in the cannabis industry and seeing an uncertain future, and comparing it to the other major land-based industry cycles in Josephine County. Most interviewed farmers compared the cannabis industry to the gold rush, and expressed concern that its rapid increase might not be sustained in the long term. Many farmers, both legacy producers that associated themselves with hippie culture or renegade counter-culturalists, as well as younger farmers that came from more indoor or urban production cultures, described a shift in the industry from one that was culturally or spiritually motivated to one that is primarily economically driven. They expressed concerns that the industrialization of cannabis with the legal market would lead to further ecological harm, while the money involved in the black market would encourage other criminal activities . Many farmers expressed a desire for more research and education, particularly around best growing practices. Most of those interviewed agreed that there was a general lack of knowledge or research-supported farming practices. While few were optimistic about the future, most expressed a belief in small-scale farms to produce in a way that was less harmful to the environment than conventional agriculture, and for persistence of a “craft cannabis” market.For the model of cannabis development onto new parcels post-legalization in 2016 , we found that the following hypothesized drivers had a significant relationship with parcels that developed new cannabis: larger parcels, lower human footprint, lower distance to nearest cannabis, higher density of local cannabis, easily cleared land cover, non-farm zoned, lower elevation, less rough, lower distance to rivers, and mapped in 2013 . All significant drivers performed in the direction we predicted , except for farm zoning, which was negatively associated with the development of new farms, and image year, which did not have an associated prediction. Distance to nearest cannabis, local cannabis density, parcel elevation, and distance to rivers or streams all had approximately linear relationships with the probability of new cannabis development . Parcel area and roughness on the other hand had non-linear relationships with possible threshold effects . The change in probability attributable to individual covariates was generally small , except for parcel area and human footprint . Rural cannabis land use in the western US has traditionally been a difficult topic for research. In this study, we demonstrated the effectiveness of an interdisciplinary approach to identify, assess, and contextualize drivers of cannabis land use and development. We combined generative cannabis farmer interviews with three models of cannabis land use in Southern Oregon during the early period of recreational legalization , to examine the relationship of spatial covariates with cannabis distribution, new development post-legalization, and plant density over time. The majority of our covariates were significant in at least one model, and combined with the context from the farmer interviews, suggest that they are likely reliable predictors of land use in this system. Previous studies examining cannabis land use and land use change have relied on biophysical covariates. Building on this foundational approach for understanding cannabis distributions, the addition of interview data to inform and contextualize models adds depth to the interpretation of modeling results, and generates new covariates that might otherwise be missed. For example, in Butsic et al. , the authors noted strong network effects on the distribution of cannabis production, and postulated that producer networks might be important in the development of the industry.

There was a wide range of responses regarding the importance of regulation for farmer decision making.

The variables missing from the paid participants survey include demographics- story, tenure, exterior in the sun, maintenance – count of active leaks, behaviors – chemical storage, scented products, windows are open, frequently take a long shower, shoes are removed, and frequency of vacuuming.Table 4 presents the results from the negative binomial regression analysis of indoor characteristics, outdoor characteristics, and behavioral characteristics on the count of active health symptoms from the merged secondary dataset comprising responses from volunteer and paid participants. Table 4 presents the results of model 1 to model 5 of the negative binomial regression analysis. Model 1 describes the relationship between demographic characteristics and the count of active health symptoms, and this model accounts for 7% of the variance in active health symptoms. Model 2 describes the relationship between indoor characteristics and the count of active health symptoms, and this model explains 0% of the variance in active health symptoms after controlling for demographic characteristics. Model 3 describes the relationship between outdoor characteristics and the count of active health symptoms, and this model explains 3% of the variance in active health symptoms after controlling for demographic and indoor characteristics. Model 4 describes the relationship between maintenance behaviors and the count of active health symptoms, and this model explains 14% of the variance in active health symptoms after controlling for demographic, indoor, and outdoor characteristics. Model 5 describes the relationship between personal behaviors and the count of active health symptoms, and this model explains 0% of the variance in active health symptoms after controlling for demographic, indoor, outdoor characteristics, and maintenance behaviors. In general, the findings suggest that demographic such as home ownership, outdoor characteristics, such as living close to environmental hazards,microgreen grow rack and maintenance behaviors such as taking care of leaks, surface dust, and odors explain most of the variance in number of health symptoms among home occupants.

The most salient findings are related to demographic, outdoor characteristics, and maintenance behaviors. In terms of demographic, one of the variables in model 1 examines whether there is any difference in count of active health symptoms between volunteer and paid participants and it was found that volunteer participants were more likely to be suffering more health symptoms . Also, renters were more likely to experience more health symptoms than owners . In terms of outdoor characteristics , as expected, living close to hazards such as a highway , an industrial area , and farm are associated with more health symptoms. Noticeable dirt on sills , a result of environmental hazards is also associated with more health symptoms. In terms of maintenance behaviors, issues such as leaks , noticeable odor , and surface dust are associated with a greater number of health symptoms. In summary, in terms of demographics, renters are more likely to suffer more health symptoms than owners. In terms of outdoor characteristics, living close to highway, farm and industrial area are associated with more health symptoms. Environmental hazards can also affect occupants’ health through the presence of dirt on sills. In terms of maintenance behaviors, issues with leaks, noticeable odors, and surface dust are associated with more health symptoms. Finally, in terms of personal behaviors, smoking is associated with more health symptoms. A second regression analysis was performed to investigate whether maintenance behaviors moderate the effect of living near environmental hazards. Polychoric factor analyses were performed to obtain a negative maintenance behaviors scale and an environmental hazards scale because some of the items in the scale are on a dichotomous scale. The items on the negative maintenance behaviors scale are leaks, noticeable odors, surface dust, water stains, molds, pests , and the factor loadings of the variables ranged between 0.28 and 0.77. The items on the environmental hazards scale are proximity to airport, highway, industrial, coffee, dry cleaner, gas station, golf course, restaurant, and the factor loadings of the variables ranged between 0.28 and 0.86.

Negative maintenance is significantly associated with an increase in number of health symptoms which means that home occupants who tend to neglect maintenance issues such as leaks, odors, surface dust, water stains, molds, and pests are more likely to exhibit more health symptoms . Environmental hazards are also significantly associated with an increase in number of health symptoms which means that home occupants who live near to environmental hazards are more likely to exhibit more health symptoms. An interaction between environmental hazards and negative maintenance was carried out in model 6 of the regression model to find out if maintenance might mitigate the effect of living near environmental hazards. However, the interaction was insignificant which suggests that among home occupants who live near environmental hazards, there is no difference in number of health symptoms among those who engage in frequent maintenance and those who do not.A robustness check was performed to compare the responses of the paid participants to those of the volunteer participants are comparable. Comparison of analyses results as a check of robustness have been documented in previous studies . A notable difference is that paid participants reported experiencing more health symptoms than volunteer participants which suggests that there might be other characteristics that differentiate them. Despite the difference in number of health symptoms experienced by both groups of participants, the variance in count of active health symptoms as explained by indoor, outdoor, and behavioral characteristics are consistent across both datasets. In both datasets, maintenance behaviors explained the greatest variance in count of active health symptoms, 9% in the dataset with responses from paid participants, and 7% in the dataset with responses from volunteer participants. Other than maintenance behaviors, outdoor characteristics also explained a sizable variability in count of active health symptoms, 6% in the dataset with responses from paid participants, and 3% in the dataset with responses from volunteer participants, followed by demographics which explained 3% in the dataset with responses from paid participants,ebb and flow flood table and 2% in the dataset with responses from volunteer participants.

The dataset with responses from the volunteer participants contains more variables than the dataset with responses from the paid participants. The additional variables in the volunteer participants dataset provide useful insights into the effects of beneficial and harmful behaviors such as the presence of carpet, frequency of vacuuming, and the use of air purifier on health symptoms. A deeper investigation into the role of these variables in mitigating or worsening indoor and outdoor characteristics, and thereby health symptoms was explored through structural equation modeling and is presented in the next section. One of the limitations of this study is that volunteer participants were motivated to participate because they probably were more likely to experience issues in their homes and/or experienced health symptoms, and this might affect the generalizability of the findings. To mitigate the effect of an unrepresentative sample, similar analyses were conducted with both the volunteer participants and the more representative paid participants . The variability in health outcomes explained by indoor, outdoor, and behavioral characteristics were similar across both groups of participants, and in both groups, demographics, outdoor characteristics, and maintenance behaviors were found to be the greatest contributors to health outcomes. While it is not possible to account fully for the bias that might occur with the volunteer participants, the study findings can still benefit individuals, especially those with health conditions who are interested in behaviors that can mitigate the impact of poor indoor air quality. Future studies should be conducted with a more representative population, thus avoiding the problem of self-selection to examine if the contribution of outdoor characteristics and maintenance behaviors to health symptoms is similar to what was found in this study. Subsequent studies should also investigate if the effect of living near environmental hazards and maintenance issues such as leaks are just as deleterious among healthy individuals, and whether the moderating behaviors highlighted in the study findings can mitigate their negative effect on health. The recruitment of volunteer participants who are likely to experience more issues in their homes and/or experienced more health issues are also likely to influence some of the study findings, for instance the use of air purifier were found to result in more health symptoms. It could be the case that participants who had more health symptoms were more likely to use air purifier. Another limitation of this study is that the data from this study were obtained from participants’ self-reported surveys which could result in issues such as social desirability, difficulty with retrieval, and judgment with a self-reported survey .

Social desirability occurs when participants are inclined to respond to survey questions so that they will be viewed in a favorable light, for instance downplaying the negative issues in their homes or the number of health symptoms that they experienced. Problem with retrieval occurs when participants must recall instances, for example, participants might not be accurate in their recall of the frequency of meal preparation. Problem with judgment occurs when the participants face an issue matching the recalled instances to the scale context. For instance, the options in the frequency of maintenance question were deferred maintenance, somewhat maintained, and highly maintained; however, participants might have a different interpretation of what constitutes highly maintained and somewhat maintained and recalled instances might map differently across participants. The final limitation has to do with the fact that all the models in the regression analysis could only explain 24% of the variance in active health symptoms. The moderate variance explained by the models is not surprising as health outcomes are affected by a multitude of factors, beyond what was covered in the survey. Other than the factors described in the survey, health outcomes can also be affected by diet and exercise, use of alcohol and drugs, quality of clinical care, education attainment, employment status, family and social support, and community safety . Land use change is one of the greatest threats to wildlife worldwide—globally, it can remove and alter habitat, or disrupt wildlife interactions . A major challenge for conservation involves navigating the negative environmental repercussions of land use change alongside the needs for human agriculture and development . This means that studying land use change fundamentally engages the role of humans within ecological systems and processes . Research has increasingly focused on human impacts on surrounding ecosystems, revealing complex interactions and consequences . However, mechanistic understanding, universal rules, or consistent predictions are difficult to define, and more context-based research is needed, especially in systems early in the process of land use transition. Cannabis agriculture provides an ideal opportunity to study ecological outcomes of land use change in a rural and rapidly changing landscape. To understand why, it is important to start with the recent history of cannabis cultivation in the western US. For decades, cannabis was grown illegally in rural areas of California, Oregon, and Washington as part of the back-to-the-land movement . These were remote areas that allowed counter-culture communities to reinvent themselves, but which also happened to host some of the nation’s highest biodiversity . The industry remained surreptitious and small-scale for many years, while ongoing law enforcement and the US “war on drugs” tried unsuccessfully to eliminate the practice . Then, the ground shifted with recreational legalization. Oregon passed recreational Adult Use cannabis legalization in the fall of 2015, and California followed suit a year later, riding a wave of recreational legalization measures that eventually passed across 19 states in the US. Very rapidly, this policy change initiated land use development for cannabis , first in areas with a history of cultivation, and later, into new regions. This shift in development was accompanied by subtle shifts in motives and philosophy behind cannabis cultivation – as one of the farmers I interviewed for Chapter 2 put it, “The quest for the all mighty dollar got in the way of the spiritual cycle of the plant.” Along with these rapid changes came calls of concern for potential environmental impacts . However, the illicit history of cannabis meant that there was very little existing research on cannabis-environment interactions, and many gaps in baseline data . To address this brewing conservation crisis, I focused my dissertation on the ecological outcomes of cannabis legalization. I was specifically interested in studying private land cannabis development in rural areas with a history of pre-legalization cultivation . In these regions, legalization has spurred major private land development for cannabis alongside high biodiversity and few other crop based agricultural land uses.

The pattern around Altiplano’s boundary is not evident at the municipality level

During my fieldwork campaign, I was not able to answer these questions, but numerous observations provided mixed indications of the nature and importance of ethnic networks in the region. Therefore, simply using language or membership in an ethnic group in the region might be an inadequate indicator, and such networks among farmers need to be analyzed further. Reducing vulnerability is a challenge for decision makers seeking to reduce social vulnerabilities in adapting to change. These efforts can take two approaches based on their timing: proactive or reactive. Proactive approaches, also known as anticipatory, are those actions taken in anticipation of the expected changes . Reactive approaches, also called responsive, are those action taken once damage materializes . The optimal approach involves including both approaches; however, many efforts are still only reactive and focused on short-term solutions. In this section, I present the efforts I found in the region and identify which are only reactive, only proactive, or a combination of both. Reducing weather-related impacts by anticipating an emergency requires the availability of emergency personnel, disaster risk plans, and maps, among other things. The regional government created a summary in 2016 of the resources available per municipality in various disaster risk management categories. A municipality requires a disaster management plan to reduce its exclusive use of reactionary approaches when such events occurs; however, 38% of Puno’s municipalities do not possess such plan . Some municipalities possess only partial plans for emergency management. During my fieldwork campaign, decision makers commented on the possibility of suspending mayors from a number of months if they don’t provide such plans by a certain deadline every year. Encouraging local decision-makers to create emergency management plans is imperative,vertical farming but the effects of such enforcements on other aspects of the community must be thought out.

Another resource to reduce vulnerability and manage a disaster is to make maps of such events available. However, 48% of the municipalities lack such maps for decision making. Figure 21 presents the locations of municipalities with complete or incomplete sets of maps. Other resources relating to disaster management and prevention involve the availability of working groups, civil defense platforms, and emergency operation centers. Almost half the municipalities do not possess an emergency operation center . Furthermore, 27% of municipalities do not have a working group dedicated to disaster risk management. Figure 21 shows that most of these municipalities are in the northwestern and southeastern corners of the region. Many countries possess organizations with government support that aim to support populations living in vulnerable areas as they try to cope with disasters. In Peru, these are called defensa civil or civil defense. In Puno, 17% of the municipalities are without a civil defense platform, as shown in Figure 21 , and many are in the same locations that lack working groups. The Ministry of Economy allocates a budget for expenditures related to reducing vulnerability and attending to emergency disasters. This budget is aimed at reducing the vulnerability of the population in the face of hazard threats. Numerous government agencies can make use of the budget for their interventions, including the Ministry of Agriculture; Ministry of Housing, Construction and Sanitation; Ministry of Transportation; Ministry of Health; Ministry of Education; INDECI; and regional and local governments.This type of budget for the department of Puno starts with 7,371,945 nuevos soles , but it changes every year according to national budget allocations. However, approaches are typically reactive when you look at how provinces use their hazard budget . During 2013, the province of Azangaro had the largest budget and used the highest percentage of its assigned budget , while Huancane used the lowest . During 2014, the province of Moho used its entire budget while the province of El Collao did not use any of its budget.

During 2015, higher percentages were used; the province of Lampa used the highest percentage of the money allocated. Putina used the lowest percentage that year. For unknown reasons, the 2016 budget information is available only until September of that year. The use of these budgets suggests that a reactionary approach dominates the region. Plans for managing risk and reducing vulnerability are increasingly common over the years; each year, reports about management of frost-related impacts involve a significant number of humanitarian aid and communication campaigns to educate the population. Education campaigns are useful for those families that are not necessarily wealthy but possess the resources to follow what the campaigns suggest. However, many farmers do not possess the resources to take the precautionary methods suggested by the campaign. Furthermore, the struggle to create precautionary approaches to weather hazards is higher at certain levels of management. For example, as mentioned above, the regional authorities were thinking about suspending mayors that would not complete a disaster risk management plan. This approach would incentivize some mayors to comply but at the same time would hurt other administrative responsibilities in the municipality. While the region is improving its plans to prevent weather-related impacts, however, precautionary approaches—even inside the plans— heavily rely on reactionary approaches. Why is there such a heavy balance toward reacting, and what will Puno need to avoid the perennial return of frost hazards and decreasing water availability in the region? Operationalizing vulnerability is considered a priority for supporting climate risk decision-making . However, understanding vulnerability as a comparative metric diminishes without a visualization methodology . The heterogeneity of variables and of goals in interpreting vulnerability have led to interest in visualizing vulnerability through mapping techniques. However, literature explicitly discussing vulnerability mapping and its influence on public policy is relatively scant. Vulnerability maps potentially allow us to identify and locate vulnerable populations . The technique’s objective is to communicate ‘vulnerability of place,’ which aids spatial planning and helps educate the public about climate interactions with human/environment systems .

Maps provide a common ground for discussion and communication among stakeholders . Measuring and mapping vulnerability is challenging. An array of concerns commonly emerges, mainly related to limited data availability and various methodological issues . There is an intrinsic trade-off between the wealth of information reflecting real-world complexity and the need to be able to communicate and use that information for policy-making and informing the public . In the context of climate variability and change, vulnerability mapping has proliferated since the release of the IPCC AR4 . This 4th assessment used the outcome vulnerability approach that is most popular for assessing vulnerability in the climate change community. However, more robust mapping techniques to assess social vulnerability emerged from the contextual vulnerability interpretation used in the IPCC AR5. Therefore,flood tray vulnerability maps increasingly focus on the spatial patterns of social-science constructs, such as the capitals I use in this research. In recent decades, there has been a well-documented revival of interest in spatial social research . Spatial social science recognizes the crucial role that spatiality plays in human society and encourages the understanding of spatial patterns and processes . In a sense, many social scientists have discovered geography. For geographers, scale is a key concept that aids in understanding spatial patterns and processes. The scale concept involves the spatial units at which we observe and characterize patterns, entities, and processes. Literature, particularly in geography, discusses the importance of scale in both lay and scientific representations of the world. The concept of scale includes three domains: thematic, temporal, and spatial. Here, I focus on spatial scale. Problems with scale and resolution are well-known in the geographic literature. The Modifiable Areal Unit Problem is a typical expression of this problem. MAUP is the “geographic manifestation of the ecological fallacy in which conclusions based on data aggregated to a particular set of districts may change if one aggregates the same underlying data to a different set of districts” . Scientific concern with MAUP can be traced back to the mid-1930s with a study by Gehlke and Biehl. This study of male juvenile delinquency in Cleveland, Ohio, showed that the correlation coefficient varied with the scale of aggregation. However, the MAUP term was not coined until 1979 when Openshaw and Taylor worked with Iowa’s electoral data. They coined the term MAUP to label the inconsistencies they found in their results with different spatial configurations. MAUP entails two types of problems: scaling and zoning. The scaling problem, also called the aggregation problem, is that using data aggregated at different spatial scales can result in different spatial patterns of a variable. Spatial scale affects statistical analyses insofar as data aggregated more tend to inflate correlations as compared with less aggregated levels .

The zoning or grouping problem is more difficult to understand than the scaling problem. The zoning problem concerns the effect of zone shape and location on spatial patterns of the data. The two MAUP components may present errors affecting the validity of the results. There is no generally straightforward solution to MAUP problems; they may not even be problems so much as they are an expression of the fact that geographic reality varies with different spatial units. It is imperative to recognize the threat of scaling and zoning problems when assessing and mapping vulnerability. The highest level of generalization in the study happens at the municipality level, which possesses the highest level of data aggregation in the study. Figure 23 presents the composite index for social vulnerability with data aggregated at the municipality level. The northwestern area, as well as various municipalities surrounding Lake Titicaca, appear to have the highest levels of social vulnerability . In developing countries, the municipality level is the most common spatial scale for mapping vulnerability due to data availability. However, while information at the municipality level might help national authorities, it is not optimal for decision-makers at more local levels. This level of aggregation does not allow decision-makers to find the right areas for intervention. Assessments at the census unit and farm levels could aid in finding such sensitive populations. The index aggregated at the agricultural census unit level presents a different image for social vulnerability. The southeastern area that borders with Bolivia and the end of the Altiplano include some of the worst cases for social vulnerability. But most of the highly vulnerable cases are in the northern areas above Lake Titicaca. Social vulnerability at the census unit level appears to be spatially associated with topography at the border of the Altiplano.Figure 25 presents a comparison with the topography of the region. The end of the Altiplano is not the area with the highest elevation, and fluctuation in altitude is not found throughout the entire vulnerable area. Since only one of the 22 indicators involves topography in this study, the clear delineation of the Altiplano border raises a question. What conditions cause socio-economic indicators to reflect the topography of the region? We cannot answer this question in this study, but we can identify it as needing more investigation. Further research should explore the reason behind such spatial association. If the census unit level provided more information than the municipality level, can the farm level provide even more information? Visualizing vulnerability at the farm levels is difficult since the coordinates overlap with each other in many cases. Therefore, I visualize the farm analysis with maps representing the percentage of farmers that are most vulnerable. Figure 26 presents the percentage of farmers inside the administrative region that are part of the worst quartile . Some census units show up to 100% of their farmers in this category. However, 80% is the highest proportion of most vulnerable farmers inside an administrative division at the municipality level. Spatial statistics aid in further understanding what is happening at the farm level. Spatial analysis at the farm level indicates that the locations at the end of the Altiplano possess statistically significant clusters of highly vulnerable farms. The analysis reveals that 60%, and in many cases above 80%, of the farmers inside those census units are part of the vulnerable clusters. Contrary to other levels, the farm level index did not present visible patterns visible without performing spatial statistics analysis. Furthermore, the outliers in the data are minimal and dispersed through the region.

Semi-structured interviews lasted approximately one hour with each of the participants

Productivity of certain crops has decreased. For example, in 2001, Puno was responsible for 81% of the national production of quinoa, but by 2016, this share had fallen to 45.2% . Even though this dissertation focuses on pre-existing vulnerability, an understanding of past and present climate dynamics will help us comprehend some of the challenges that households experience. Peru’s climate is affected by orography and controlled by water vapor transport and availability from/at the Amazon Basin, the Pacific Ocean’s behavior, and the presence of Lake Titicaca . Peru has climates that depend on altitude and aspect stemming from the Andes, which rise abruptly from a very narrow Pacific coastal strip to the west of the country. Annual precipitation is highly variable over the Andes and Altiplano.Among all high mountain ranges in the world, the Andes is the region that atmospheric science has studied the least . Furthermore, a detailed understanding of the characteristics that mountainous regional climate possesses is complicated. This is due to a scarcity in observations at the spatial and temporal resolution suitable for climate research in regions with a complex terrain; current Global Climate Models are also constrained in how they represent such topography . The Peruvian Andes starts at approximately 4.3° S latitude and runs south until 16.3° S. It is located between the Peruvian Amazon and the Pacific arid coast. Due to solar heating, the afternoon patterns over the Andes display high convergence at higher elevations, with divergence at the foothills. A reverse pattern is observed during nights and mornings . Precipitation varies on each of the Peruvian Andes slopes, with Pacific slopes characterized by arid and dry conditions, while Eastern slopes are warm, moist, and rainy . Altiplano’s precipitation is highly sensitive to large-scale circulation anomalies. It has a pronounced annual cycle with more than 70% of its precipitation concentrated in the austral summer . During austral summer,vertical grow water vapor from the Amazon basin is present in high concentrations in the boundary layer, which destabilizes the tropospheric column .

Furthermore, rainfall happens in intense episodes that last one to two weeks, followed by dry spells of equal duration. Changes in the moisture transport over the eastern central Andean slopes produce moisture fluctuations over the Altiplano, which affects precipitation . Climate variability in this region is influenced greatly by El Niño Southern Oscillations’ modulation over the western Altiplano . ENSO is characterized by irregular two to seven-year fluctuations between a warm phase and a cold phase . It’s worth emphasizing that this Altiplano region is markedly different than other areas of Peru. The ENSO warm phase shows an 88% increase in precipitation over the northern coastal region . However, a decrease of 18% in precipitation over the Southern highland and Altiplano area is experienced during the same warm phase . Exhibited impacts are opposite during ENSO cold phases but at different amplitudes than those displayed during the warm phases. In terms of temperature, conditions can reach extremes. Frigid temperatures prevail at night due to loss of heat through low cloud coverage, atmospheric density, and vapor pressure. Throughout the year, especially at higher elevations, these temperatures drop below freezing . During the day, average air temperature ranges from −10°C to 23°C. Frost, hail, and cold temperature then persist in the region. These conditions, in combination with social conditions, create great impacts on agriculture and livelihoods. Asset-based vulnerability assessments are helpful in identifying the available resources that can aid human agency. However, structured survey methodologies cannot capture by themselves a contextual understanding of local realities . Operationalizing social vulnerability requires an understanding of the structural factors involved, the uncertainties that individuals deal with , and the external constraints placed on assets . These assessments must attend to context and recognize that resources do not exist or are developed uniformly across groups . Approaches that might work in a particular location or with a particular socioeconomic group may not work elsewhere or with other groups . Indicators that assess vulnerability do not necessarily generalize to other locations . Therefore, it is imperative to understand the local context and the environment in which the population deals with threats. Selecting which indicators are essential for a specific location and understanding local context is possible by employing ethnographic and fieldwork methodologies.

Exploring, unpacking, and describing the local perceptions and social meaning of a phenomenon are believed to be a starting point for qualitative research . It is essential to understand the importance of ethnographic fieldwork in gathering insights into the relationship between culture and climate. Engaging in daily life and social relationships through fieldwork and participant observation provide such contextual understanding . Eakin, a geographer, gathered ethnographic data on climate and economic change in rural Mexico. She expressed that “some of my greatest insights into the livelihoods of farmers in the Puebla-Tlaxcala Valley came from simply being there: helping with the harvest, chatting with mothers outside the primary school, attending a wedding celebration or school graduation. Alone, none of these methods and data sources would have been sufficient to understand the full complexity of the farmers’ vulnerability” . Qualitative evidence relating to people’s perspectives and views aids in determining what interventions are appropriate in alleviating risks and reducing vulnerabilities. Furthermore, it allows discoveries to arise unexpectedly due to the slow accumulation of evidence and provides entry points for intervention . It can allow us to detect key barriers to change, identify local resources, aid in the selection of indicators, and create action plans. These types of studies aid in formulating relevant policies and guide assessments that used structured survey datasets. Before developing an asset-based assessment, it is imperative to understand the ‘why,’ ‘how,’ and ‘under what circumstances’ such assets influence social vulnerability. Neither qualitative nor quantitative research approaches by themselves address the full picture. The complexity of assessing vulnerability requires using both approaches to build on each other. Qualitative approaches can be used to unpack the processes and contextual factors that have contributed to the failure or success of a certain practice. After such information is collected and processed, quantitative approaches can be used to build on the results. During the fieldwork campaign, archival data were collected to complement the information obtained during ethnographic observations and semi-structured interviews.

These secondary data include reports , publications, news articles, and documents concerning social vulnerability and weather events for the region. Information from INDECI related to weather emergencies was collected for a total of 415 reports. This information was collected from government ministries, local researchers, universities, and NGOs who have worked in the area. News articles and other documents were collected from internet sources and via library facilities. The majority of these data were not available in digital form or were only available in archives from the organizations. These observations aid in understanding Puno’s culture and social mechanisms. Moreover, they are imperative to understanding differences between Puno’s department and the customs of neighboring geographical regions. This aids in understanding what behaviors are common in the region versus unique to Puno. Activities and interactions were observed in four nearby departments: Tacna, Moquegua, Arequipa, and Cuzco. Various visits to Bolivia aided in understanding Puno’s uniqueness due to its connection with main geographical features, such as the Altiplano and Lake Titicaca,vertical outdoor farming and similarities among linguistics groups . Because of the extend time frame of my observations, I was able to attend numerous important religious festivities and local activities. Experiencing these activities on more than one occasion and at more than one location helped me better understand situations that only happened once, versus recurring ones. Furthermore, experiencing the weather myself and comparing these experiences to those expressed by locals enhanced my understanding of local biases related to weather events. Structured interviews frequently produce quantitative information; therefore, the qualitative information that inform this study comes from semi-structured interviews. These interviews are somewhat like guided conversations. They are designed with open-ended questions and conducted in conjunction with observational data collection . In comparison to quantitative analysis, qualitative studies generally involve a smaller sample size than quantitative ones . However, a formula is not available for determining sample size in a qualitative analysis. A series of guidelines are present in the literature to aid in the selection of a sample size. Various approaches could be used to determine what is an optimal sample size. Literature about qualitative research has mentioned fifteen as the smallest acceptable sample size . Meanwhile, Ritchie et al. stated that sample sizes in qualitative studies regularly “lie under 50.” Experienced qualitative researchers have stated that after around 20 interviews, little that is ‘new’ comes out of transcripts . I follow the concept of saturation here in order to stay faithful to qualitative research principles .

Reaching saturation occurs when new data collected do not shed any further light on the issues covered by the study. Saturation can be reached by using maximum variation sampling and an educated guess. Maximum variation sampling involves selecting participants based on their specific characteristics, making sure to sample across the range of these characteristics. Participants belong to one of the following two groups: administrative personnel and farmers. Administrative personnel include decision makers at regional, provincial, and municipality levels. Not all the participants are farmers themselves, but they have some decision-making power over the region of interest.The second group comprises farmers . To ensure maximal variation of the sample, participants in this group represented various subgroups: male or female, different age groups, different primary languages, either subsistence or commercial farmers, and farmers with or without livestock. A final sample size was determined after achieving saturation and following maximum variation. This study consists of 55 participants consisting of 10 administrative personnel and 45 agricultural household heads. At the beginning of the interview verbal consent was obtained from the participants. The interviews were conducted in Spanish unless a participant felt more comfortable speaking a native language . I am fluent in Spanish, but a trusted translator was present if the interviewee preferred to talk in a native language. The availability of resources and entitlements shapes social vulnerability. However, an awareness of the pressures external to social vulnerability is imperative to understand the local context in which these vulnerability conditions occur. This dissertation focuses on assessing social vulnerability; as mentioned before, that does not equate to undervaluing the effects of the weather hazard itself. The external factors in this section relate to the weather events and the resulting impacts experienced by multiple stakeholders during the fieldwork campaign, as well as the challenges that they encountered. Agrometeorological reports from the Peruvian National Weather Service complement the observations, testimonies, and reports I obtained from stakeholders through ethnographic observations and semi-structured interviews. Here I also used written media sources—e.g., newspapers—to complement previous information. The fieldwork campaign started in January 2016 and finished in March 2017, and during this time frame, Puno experienced numerous weather-related events: frosts, drought, flooding, strong winds, hail, snow, and thunderstorms. According to local reports from the Instituto Nacional de Defensa Civil —the institute in charge of disaster management and prevention—the region reported a total of 415 weather-related emergencies during those months. Each report includes a summary of all the damages experienced inside the municipality for a given weather event. The INDECI representative for each province creates and sends those reports to the regional office. However, these reports lack standardization of meteorological variables that make difficult the understanding of the impacts. These reports are per municipality and are not representative of the event’s intensity or the spatial extent of the damage. Also, not every extreme weather condition appears in a report, since they only include emergencies. Due to the nature of reports and experiences during the fieldwork campaign, this section focuses on low-temperature events and drought conditions in Puno. The two types of weather hazards present different issues with respect to their relationship with human agency and social vulnerability. Therefore, this section has two subsections for each of the hazards and its relationship to vulnerability. Low-temperature events are prevalent in the region, and their impacts are highly related to a lack of assets. A description of the relationship between low-temperature and its impacts gives specific examples of the problem going beyond just the experience of cold temperatures. On the other hand, drought conditions in Puno are challenging to predict and report.

These include alginates from brown algae and agar and carrageenans from red algae

A fit-free approach for the analysis of fluorescence spectral components in the microscopy images which does not require an a priori knowledge of the basis spectra was used. This technique is non-invasive and could be utilized to quantitatively identify different molecular species in live samples . In this work, we present a biometric tool developed for identifying the presence and the concentration of carrageenans that occur naturally in the wall cell and in the intercellular matrix of red algae. This tool also has the potential to be useful for the identification of other seaweed-derived hydrocolloids. The tool detects spectral emission from explants using confocal microscopy, and it has been found to be a powerful method for identifying specific emission fingerprints of autofluorescence of compounds present in seaweeds. This study reports on the identification of several spectral fluorescence emission fingerprints from different auto-fluorescence compounds spatially mapped in the commercially important red algal species K. alvarezii. The explants imaged were cultivated in vitro and treated with the polyamines spermidine, putrescine,grow table and spermine.Phase 1: in vitro culture, grown in seawater in the laboratory. Phase 2: explants from phase 1 transferred to indoor culture tanks in the laboratory. Phase 3: explants from phase 2 transferred to outdoor cultivation tanks on the mainland. Phase 4: explants from phase 3 transferred to ropes anchored in the sea. In situ sea culture was carried out within the Maritime Concessions of the company BGracilarias de Panamá, S.A.^ in the Cativa area of the Province of Colon near the Caribbean entrance of the Panama Canal. One of the fourteen farms designated by polygons within the Maritime Concessions was selected for in situsea culture. It was identified as polygon 11. The selected polygon was located in the northern section of Largo Remo within a lagoon open to the sea and surrounded by mangrove trees; substratum was predominantly sandy bottom with patches formed by small communities of sea grasses.

Seaweed cultivation activities were originally established in this area to involve local community members with limited livelihood options in the development of a type of aquaculture considered Beco-friendly. The physical infrastructures of the farms were thought to potentially buffer mangroves and coral reefs from the negative impacts of extreme weather events . In addition, it was hoped that the long-term allocation of the marine common spaces for sustainable seaweed farming in the Concessions might shield this sensitive area from mega-scale development projects in the rapidly industrializing region . The Polygon 11 used for this study in phase 4 is located within one of the most closely monitored tropical coastal zones in the world . Environmental information has been collected throughout the area since the early 1900s, with an archive of historical in situ data recorded by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and 80 years of data collected by the Panama Canal Authority. In 2000, the Coastal Research Institute of GKSS, Germany, installed an in situ high tech monitoring system to integrate environmental data at the site. The seaweed farm sites were selected based upon environmental parameter averages identified as ideal measures for successful seaweed cultivation. These were determined by geographical area and degree of variation by season . Data indicated an annual temperature range of 28 to 30 °C, pH range, 7.0– 9.0, and salinity of 32.8–34.8 ‰. All these data ranges have remained relatively stable over the last several years . Growth of K. alvarezii is favored when salinity is about 32 to 35 ‰ and it is inhibited below 28 ‰ . Kappaphycus alvarezii growth rates seem to be optimal in a pH range from 7.0 to 9.0 with explants exposed to solar light at 30 cm depth and solar light intensity 845–1837 μmol photons m−2 s −1 . . In all phases of this study, explants were planted in the sea on ropes similar to those used in commercial seaweed farms.

To observe carrageenan in the cell walls and within the center cellular matrix of the cultured algae by confocal microscopy, it was necessary to develop a model of in vitro culture. This was done in phase 1 at the laboratory level using incubators containing cultivated K. alvarezii seed stock obtained from the seaweed farms. The incubator was designed at the Galeta Point Marine Laboratory of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute constructed with ATT double glazed window glass consisting of two panels with an intermediate air chamber and double sealed with butyl and polysulfide or silicone. This insulation maintained a controlled temperature between 30 and 25 °C and constant humidity between 60 and 75 %. The incubator maintains a irradiation with two fluorescent light tubes at 40 W and two 20 W tubes, with a photoperiod of 12 h light and 12 h dark. The spectral emissions and confocal microscopy were explored as alternative technologies for measurement of carrageenan quality of seaweed. This histological analysis was performed at the Laboratory for Fluorescence Dynamics, University of California, Irvine, USA.This study combines an experimental approach to enhance commercial carrageenan productivity with the novel application of confocal laser-scanning microscopy, a technique capable of measuring and characterizing carrageenan content in vitro. We tuned the wavelengths of excitation and emission to record the emission fluorescence of carrageenans, and each color visually represents a different type of carrageenan although in this paper we have not identified the specific types. The identification of several spectral fluorescence emission fingerprints from different auto-fluorescence compounds from explants of K. alvarezii are reported and spatially mapped. These fingerprints have the potential to improve strain selection of explants with the aim to increase the carrageenan yield of seaweed farming operations and to potentially enable wholesale pricing to correspond with crop quality. Carrageenans were characterized using auto-fluorescence properties of the species of K. alvarezii subjected to treatment with different polyamines: putrescine, spermidine, and spermine.

A four-phase cultivation pipeline is presented for enhancing and assessing the carrageenan content of seaweed crops encompassing in vitro culture techniques. Measurements of carrageenan fluorescence using bright field microscopy detected carrageenan in both the tetrasporophyte and in the female tissues of Eucheuma isiforme J. Agardh, and the calculation of metachromatic indices gave a higher value for the medullary cell walls in the tetrasporophyte than in the female gametophyte . During culture in the laboratory,vertical rack we followed the explants growth by measuring size, weight, and number of new apices and calluses every 15 days after seeding. We used polyamines Put, Spd, and Spm as plant growth regulator treatments that were expected to favor the development of cystocarps. Particularly, Spm promoted sporulation in several Rhodophytes such as Hydropuntia cornea and Grateloupia imbricate . Investigations into the effects of PGR on algal growth and development are necessary to understand the physiological basis of algal growth, callus formation, and regeneration. This information can then lead to improved seaweed cultivation techniques by establishing and adopting viable methodsof enhancing strains of commercially important species . Zitta et al. found that the thick wall of the cells, which are composed in part of callus filaments, showed the presence of acidic polysaccharides, suggesting a large content of carrageenan and neutral polysaccharides. In this study, calli and new apices were counted from day 15. Calli observed gave rise to irregularly branched uniseriate filaments, and we presume callus formation was initiated in the first week of seeding in phase 1. The new apical structures were elongated and we assumed that cell elongation occurs in the presence of large amounts of disorganized mitochondria and chloroplasts. The increased number of these organelles could be related to an increase in the process of cellular respiration and thus energy metabolism , supporting subsequent cell divisions and the formation of lateral branching. According to Doty , K. cottonii thalli are compressed to flatten above the basal segment; prostate, irregular in form, or with linear segments with irregular occurrences of protuberances or branches. The images obtained in this study by the confocal microscopy of the control callus and apices of an explant of K. alvarezii indicated a broader distribution of the green cluster at the cell center and at the cell wall of the callus. The apices showed a higher percentage of red color at the cell wall while color at the center of the cell was very similar to the callus. This suggests a distinct characteristic compared with the callus and apex treated with spermidine 10−5 M . These samples demonstrated a different morphology than the sample shown in Figs. 6 and 7. This type of morphology seems to result in a large contribution of the green component present both at the center and at the cell wall of the apex and more red color in the cell wall of the callus. It is possible that the content and type of carrageenan may also correspond to specific parts of the algal structure, and these could possibly be impacted by various environmental conditions. Therefore, the spectral phasor analysis is a very simple, time-sensitive way to obtain a specific fingerprint of a sample of uncertain carrageenan composition. The fluorescence properties of carrageenan are used in this study to show that there are more than two spectral components in each sample and that each sample can be classified in terms of percent of pixels corresponding to at least three spectral components. While the primary focus of this research was carried out utilizing different laboratory culture techniques, the success of the approach also depends on the efficacy of polyamine treated seed stocks in the natural marine habitat.

We found in our study that improvements in seedlings produced in the laboratory also held in the natural marine habitat. If this success is shown to be repeatable, then our approach could be utilized to improve the quality and quantity of the product from the farms with obvious benefits to the industry. This study suggests a novel technique for seaweed cultivators to assess the potential carrageenan yield of their crops in order to better select in vitro cultured explants prior to planting out on farms at sea. Consideration must also be given to these commercial possibilities beyond the usage of carrageenan in the food processing industries, such as in pharmacology, where high-quality parameters are required. Food products for human consumption, mainly associated with the Asian market, account for 83 to 90 % of the total value of macroalgae.The various species possess high levels of secondary metabolites and structural polysaccharides of commercial value.Today’s growing demand for carrageenan and the need for more sustainable farming practices is a large challenge. There is an urgent requirement to understand and detect differences among types and qualities of carrageenan as a means of managing higher yielding, economically viable, long-term farming practices . According to FAO statistics, world carrageenan seaweed farming production increased from less than 1 million wet tonnes in 2000 to 5.6 million wet tonnes in 2010, with the corresponding farm gate value increasing from US$72 million to US$1.4 billion. Major carrageenan seaweed farming countries include Indonesia, the Philippines, the United Republic of Tanzania, Malaysia, and China . Despite the high demand for carrageenans, seaweed scientists, farmers, buyers, and processors still lack accessible tools to accurately and inexpensively assess the carrageenan content of seaweed crops and associated products throughout all stages of growth and refinement. We continue to hone our studies related to the application of in vitro culture techniques of red seaweeds of commercial importance. Our efforts will focus on developing new plant biotechnology applications for the prevention of diseases of genera such as Kappaphycus, Gracilaria, and others of commercial importance. Finally, carrageenan seaweed farming in particular, has evolved into a successful commercial endeavor in a number of tropical countries endowed with clear, unpolluted intertidal environments and protected beach locations . The area of farming at the entrance of the Caribbean side of the Panama Canal has a very specific annual weather pattern with a rainy season that lasts 9 months with 3 months of dry season. During our studies, we have not found a correlation between the seasonal weather patterns and the quality of the product . We note that this area of the Caribbean seems to be protected from the adverse impacts of hurricanes . This unique condition is an important consideration regarding the importance of commercially viable seaweed farms in this region.

Triangulation of these methods improves the validation of results

The methods used for evaluating curriculum efficacy include 1) semi-structured teacher interviews, 2) student surveys , and 3) participant-site observation.Deeper understanding can be gained from a small set of cases on CCE, and best practices can then be applied to a larger universe of schools. More specific to each method, teacher interviews followed a six-question interview guide and were semi-structured in nature. Compared with post-intervention surveys, this allows basic statistical analysis to define the effect size in the sample population and whether it is significant. The survey assessment includes 10 knowledge-based questions on climate science and food systems applications, as well as 19 engagement questions asking opinion statements measured on Likert-type scales. This multi-faceted assessment of climate literacy recognizes that “knowledge about climate change can be divided into several general and overlapping categories: knowledge about how the climate system works; specific knowledge about the causes, consequences, and potential solutions to global warming; contextual knowledge placing human-caused global warming in historical and geographic perspective; and practical knowledge that enables individual and collective action” . The engagement questions adapt the Six Americas survey questions to capture students’ change in engagement towards climate change following the curriculum intervention. Participant and site observation over a six week period captures important features of the school climate, both environmental and social, that help contextualize interpretation of results. The quality of the school garden, behavioral norms, and student informal interactions are all variables of interest for understanding other forms of data collection. In climate literacy evaluations, it is important to understand student intention to take action and follow up to document concrete examples of students taking action, which goes beyond simple survey and interview protocols. Certainly, questions can be posed to students asking whether they feel more empowered to seek out their own additional knowledge and participate in climate actions,hydroponic rack system but ideally these questions can be followed up with evaluation tools documenting actual action outcomes. This was not possible in the contexts of study reported on below but should be a focus for future student climate literacy evaluations. Results presented and discussed below are broadly relevant to climate change education interventions, with some insights as well into the value of food as an engaging entry point or frame for the climate education conversation.

Post-intervention teacher interview themes revealed a widespread appreciation of coteaching as a mechanism for delivering climate change instruction. All teachers interviewed expressed enthusiasm for having a content expert present to deliver instruction on climate, complementing the garden teachers’ expertise in food-related topics, classroom management and student behavior. The positive response from teachers is important to contextualizing student results, as the more enthusiastic and knowledgeable teachers became about climate change connections in the school garden, the more engaging lessons became for students.Teachers were able to learn from the experience and expressed desire to replicate elements of the curriculum on their own in the future, thus meeting one of the process-specific goals of the research. Interviewees also revealed a common theme of searching for hope and action amidst the daunting reality of climate change; the garden and classroom were often identified as key arenas where hope and solution steps exist. Key quotes from interviews are highlighted in Table 15 below.These results, in particular the challenges highlighted by teachers, closely match national findings on climate change education. In a recent national review of science teachers, the first nationally representative study of science educators to focus on climate change, fewer than half of all teachers reported any formal coursework on climate change, yet over two thirds would like targeted professional development opportunities to allow them to dive in deeper to this complex and emotionally sensitive topic . It is well established that teachers are in need of professional development in order to teach an unfamiliar subject with confidence and competence, and several national leaders in climate education are addressing this . Having a climate science “expert” in the classroom to co-teach a climate change curriculum for the first time is another promising form of PD explored here. Partnerships emerged as a key feature enabling success of food and climate education in schools, mirroring the findings in example 1 above. Partner organizations and individuals are able to provide infrastructure support, outdoor learning environments, guest speakers to reinforce climate education units, and program evaluation assistance.

Questions of how to scale impact via partnerships at the district or state level and education policy implications are discussed below. Examining results by school context offers strategies for scaling this type of intervention in rural vs. urban school districts. Students at the Lopez school, with abundant local farm and forest resources to devote to furthering climate curricula endeavors, selected a bio-char experiment as a class climate action project, and will be applying locally produced bio-char to test plots in the school garden to compare with non-treated plots , in partnership with the community. This community-school partnership adds to the body of successful climate change engagement strategies meriting replication, particularly other rural communities where local farmers might be interested in participating in farm to school programming at the school or district level. Stepping back and looking at on-the-ground realities across the contexts of study presented in this dissertation, there are numerous examples of individuals and organizations who are theoretically on the same “team” when it comes to goals of mitigating climate change and advancing social equity, and yet engage in intense debate in their activities, rhetoric, and interactions around how to achieve these goals. Vegetarians calling out those who eat grass fed beef on Lopez for contributing to negative climate impacts; urban farmers with different visions and theories of social change choosing not to work together to advocate for policy change; educators who promote a more factual teaching of climate science arguing with those who aspire to a more holistic, socially grounded form of climate education. This antagonism among those working towards shared goals can be seen playing out on a global scale as well: environmental movements that do not adequately incorporate environmental justice, indigenous land ethics, and communities of color; climate activists who disagree about how best to reduce emissions, who bears primary responsibility for action, or whether to directly confront entrenched institutions and power structures; new farmers who glorify small-scale agriculture without acknowledging that pathways to farm ownership are not equitably available to all groups; food systems researchers who demand immediate revolution pitting themselves against those who argue for a more gradual approach to change from within the system. Recognizing these rifts as well as the reality that the global food and climate system is currently at a critical juncture, Anderson articulates a vision for a “healthy,rolling benches canada sustainable food system” that joins with other visions, key to any successful social movement.

Confronting the dominant food system and greenhouse gas emitting global economy can only happen through a broad-based social movement where the majority of people across race and class lines can see themselves held in a common vision. Social movements, according to Saru Jayaraman , by definition contend directly with the centers of power; they do not avoid direct confrontation in seeking to change the status quo. Remembering as Obama repeatedly told Americans that “there is more that unites us than divides us,” there is work to be done reconciling disagreement among food and climate researchers, practitioners, and activists in order to confront the forces of the status quo: corporations, bureaucracy, and fossil fuel interests that prevent progress on issues where there is wide public support, in effect subverting democracy. For example, there is an opportunity for alignment among those who choose not to eat meat for environmental reasons and those who choose to eat grass fed meat in opposition to a common enemy: concentrated animal feeding operations . CAFOs contribute dramatic negative impacts to the environment and human health, beyond the footprint of their feedlots and extending to the vast acreages used to grow synthetically fertilized, monocropped grains for animal consumption. Imagine if much of this acreage was converted to growing diverse requirements of a plant-based diet for humans, and some was allocated to grass fed meat operations . Cows contribute to pasture restoration and can lead to net carbon sequestration through aerating and adding manure to grassland soils. Furthermore, the manure from some grass fed beef operations contributes to creating high quality compost that enables organic vegetable production. There is a possible convergence between disparate food systems activism that requires further research and participatory collaborations among food scholars, consumer groups, farmers, and ranchers. Education systems can contribute to reconciling some food systems debates as well: well-crafted food and climate curricula can enable collective action by uncovering shared motivation among different actors, organizations, and individuals. The chapters of this dissertation articulate the role of small farms and farm-based education in providing social-ecological and educational benefits to communities. Small farms are involved in educating youth, beginning farmers, and the general public about the food system as a whole, and its potential to transform into a climate-beneficial system that promotes rather than destroys human health.

Many small farmers are on the front lines of pioneering climate friendly growing practices, gathering data on these practices, and educating their communities about why they are doing what they’re doing. These small farmers are leading farmer-to-farmer workshops, hosting tours of their farm for the public, partnering with researchers and applying for soil health grants, and engaging with schools in their communities to provide both farm-based education and nutritious local food for school lunches. How can the work of small farmers be supported and scaled up? They are undoubtedly positive community influences and providers of essential services . But when so much is stacked against them in terms of marketing channels, research and technical support, land access, and political influence, how does small scale farming come to be an occupation that more people are drawn to, and one that is economically viable? According to a recent publication , less than 1% of the USDA Research, Education and Extension budget is allocated to support agroecological and organic farming operations . In the policy realm, change is needed in budget allocations, incentive structures, and subsidies in order to truly scale the food system transition work that small farmers are leading . Looking to the technology and infrastructure arena, farmers in the cases presented clearly state that additional tools, equipment and facilities appropriate for processing and transporting smaller quantities of food items over shorter distances are also integral to allowing food systems to relocalize.Small farmers in developing countries are producing 70% of the world’s food supply on 30% of the available agricultural land , but some regions of the world are inherently more difficult places to produce food than others, and some degree of large scale farming and global distribution will be necessary to support a growing global population and buffer against adverse conditions in particular locations. Distribution channels must shift in order to allow food to more easily reach the people and places most in need, and export-oriented economies must refocus on feeding their own people—these are areas for future research and civic engagement. This dissertation is not arguing that all farms must be small farms, nor is it a prescription for how or what food should be grown in each region of the world. It is also not arguing that small agroecological farms are “the future of food;” many competing visions exist for how food should be produced in the future, from controlled-environment agriculture to lab-grown meat to renewed attention to soil health. My cases do not speak to every part of the world, but rather are nested within and illustrative of larger theoretical frameworks. I am not arguing for the complete abandonment of a global food system to be replaced with entirely small organic farms serving local communities all over the world. Rather, I am arguing for the valuable social, ecological, and educational role small farmers are playing in addition to producing food—a role that current industrial production farms are not able to play—and arguing for political-economic system shifts that allow small farms to co-exist with larger farms and “scale across” as a vital form of human connection to the food system.

Preliminary student surveys provide a baseline for student knowledge and engagement

In order to facilitate what scholars such as Anderson et al. 2018a refers to as the “agroecological transition,” already underway in many urban food ecosystems around the globe , we argue that applying an agroecological approach to inquiry and research into the diversity of sites, goals, and ways in which food is produced in cities can help enumerate the synergistic effects of urban food producers. This in turn encourages the realization of the transformative potential of urban farming, and an articulation of its value meriting protected space in urban regions. Urban agroecology is an evolving concept that includes the social-ecological and political dimensions as well as the science of ecologically sustainable food production . UAE provides a more holistic framework than urban agriculture to assess how well urban food initiatives produce food and promote environmental literacy, community engagement, and ecosystem services. This paper presents a case study of 35 urban farms in San Francisco’s East Bay in which we investigated key questions related to mission, production , labor, financing, land tenure, and educational programming. Our results reveal a rich and diverse East Bay agroecosystem engaged in varying capacities to fundamentally transform the use of urban space and the regional food system by engaging the public in efforts to stabilize, improve, and sustainably scale urban food production and distribution. Yet, as in other cities across the country, they face numerous threats to their existence, including land tenure, labor costs, development pressure, and other factors that threaten wider adoption of agroecological principles. We begin by comparing the concepts of UA and UAE in scholarship and practice, bringing in relevant literature and intellectual histories of each term and clarifying how we apply the term “agroecology” to our analysis. We pay particular attention to the important nonecological factors that the literature has identified as vital to agroecology, but seldomly documents .We discuss the results, showing how an agroecological method of inquiry amplifies important aspects of urban food production spaces and identifies gaps in national urban agriculture policy circles. We conclude by positing unique characteristics of urban agroecology in need of further studies and action to create equitable,rolling flood tables resilient and protected urban food systems.Agricultural policy in the United States is primarily concerned with yield, markets, monetary exchange, and rural development.

The United States Department of Agriculture defines agricultural activities as those taking place on farms. Farms are defined as “any place from which $1,000 or more of agricultural products were produced and sold, or normally would have been sold, during the year” . Urban agriculture has been proliferating across the country in the last decade on both public and private lands, as both for-profit and nonprofit entities, with diverse goals, missions and practices largely centered on food justice priorities and re-localizing the food system. Yet U.S. agriculture policy has been struggling to keep up. In 2016, the USDA published an Urban Agriculture Toolkit, which aims to provide aspiring farmers with the resources to start an urban farm including an overview of the startup costs, strategies for accessing land and capital, assessing soil quality and water availability, production and marketing, and safety and security . The 2018 U.S. Farm Bill provides a definition of urban agriculture to include the practices of aquaponics, hydroponics, vertical farming, and other indoor or controlled environment agriculture systems primarily geared towards commercial sales. In both the Toolkit and Farm Bill, non-profit, subsistence, and educational urban farming enterprises are not well integrated or included in the conceptualization of UA. While there are many definitions of urban agriculture in the literature from the simplest definition of “producing food in cities” to longer descriptions of UA such as that of the American Planning Association that incorporate school, rooftop and community gardens “with a purpose extending beyond home consumption and education,” the focus of many UA definitions used in policy arenas continues to center around the production and sale of urban produced foods. Accordingly, food systems scholars have recognized that “Urban agriculture, [as defined], is like agriculture in general”, devoid of the many political, educational, and food justice dimensions that are prioritized by many U.S. urban farming efforts. Thus the social-political nature of farming, food production, and food sovereignty are not invoked by formal UA policy in the U.S. Many goals and activities common in urban food production, including education, nonmonetary forms of exchange, and gardening for subsistence are obscured by the productivist definitions and can be thus neglected in policy discussions.

Furthermore, UA policy in the U.S. remains largely agnostic about the sustainability of production practices and their impact on the environment. While U.S. agriculture policy narrowly focuses on the production, distribution and marketing potential of UA, broader discussion of its activities and goals proliferate among food systems scholars from a range of fields including geography, urban planning, sociology, nutrition, and environmental studies. These scholars are quick to point out that UA is much more than production and marketing of food in the city and includes important justice elements . In the Bay Area context, we continue to see the result of this dichotomy: thriving urban farms lose their leases , struggle to maintain profitability or even viability and encounter difficulties creating monetary value out of their social enterprises. In light of the ongoing challenge to secure longevity of UA in the United States, there is a need for an alternative framework through which food and farming justice advocates can better understand and articulate what UA is, and why it matters in cities.Agroecology is defined as “the application of ecological principles to the study, design and management of agroecosystems that are both productive and natural resource conserving, culturally sensitive, socially just and economically viable” , and presents itself as a viable alternative to productivist forms of agriculture. Agroecology in its most expansive form coalesces the social, ecological, and political elements of growing food in a manner that directly confronts the dominant industrial food system paradigm, and explicitly seeks to “transform food and agriculture systems, addressing the root causes of problems in an integrated way and providing holistic and long-term solutions” . It is simultaneously a set of ecological farming practices and a method of inquiry, and, recently, a framework for urban policymaking ; “a practice, a science and a social movement” . Agroecology has strong historical ties to the international peasant rights movement La Via Campesina’s food sovereignty concept,flood and drain tray and a rural livelihoods approach to agriculture where knowledge is created through non-hegemonic forms of information exchange, i.e. farmer-to farmer networks . Mendez et al. describe the vast diversity of agroecological perspectives in the literature as “agroecologies” and encourage future work that is characterized by a transdisciplinary, participatory and action-oriented approach. In 2015, a global gathering of social movements convened at the International Forum of Agroecology in Selengue, Mali to define a common, grassroots vision for the concept, building on earlier gatherings in 2006 and 2007 to define food sovereignty and agrarian reform.

The declaration represents the views of small scale food producers, landless rural workers, indigenous peoples and urban communities alike, affirming that “Agroecology is not a mere set of technologies or production practices” and that “Agroecology is political; it requires us to challenge and transform structures of power in society” . The declaration goes on to outline the bottom-up strategies being employed to build, defend and strengthen agroecology, including policies such as democratized planning processes, knowledge sharing, recognizing the central role of women, building local economies and alliances, protecting biodiversity and genetic resources, tackling and adapting to climate change, and fighting corporate cooptation of agroecology. Recently, scholars have begun exploring agroecology in the urban context. In 2017, scholars from around the world collaborated on an issue of the Urban Agriculture magazine titled “Urban Agroecology,” conceptualizing the field both in theory and through practical examples of city initiatives, urban policies, citizen activism, and social movements. In this compendium, Van Dyck et al. describe urban agroecology as “a stepping stone to collectively think and act upon food system knowledge production, access to healthy and culturally appropriate food, decent living conditions for food producers and the cultivation of living soils and biodiversity, all at once.” Drawing from examples across Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia and the United States, the editors observe that urban agroecology “is a practice which – while it could be similar to many ‘urban agricultural’ initiatives born out of the desire to re-build community ties and sustainable food systems, has gone a step further: it has clearly positioned itself in ecological, social and political terms” . Urban agroecology takes into account urban governance as a transformative process and follows from the re-emergence of food on the urban policy agenda in the past 5-10 years. However, it requires further conceptual development. Some common approaches in rural agroecology do not necessarily align with urban settings, where regenerative soil processes may require attention to industrial contamination. In other cases, the urban context provides “specific knowledge, resources and capacities which may be lacking in rural settings such as shorter direct marketing channels, greater possibility for producer-consumer relations, participatory approaches in labour mobilisation and certification, and initiatives in the area of solidarity economy” .We employed a participatory and collaborative mixed methods approach, involving diverse stakeholders from the East Bay Agroecosystem. We held two stakeholder input sessions involving over 40 urban farmers and food advocates to co-create the research questions, advise on the data collection process, interpret the results, and prioritize workshop topics for the community. We administered an online Qualtrics survey to 120 urban farms in the East Bay that had been previously identified by the University of California Cooperative Extension Urban Agriculture working group and additional outreach.

The survey launched in Summer 2018, which is a particularly busy time for farmers, and in response to farmer feedback was kept open until November 2018. 35 farmers responded in total, representing a 30% response rate. While there are limitations in our ability to generalize findings to the East Bay urban farming landscape as a whole due to the relatively small sample size, we obtained a fairly representative sample of the diversity of farm types in the East Bay based on our typology of the original 120 farm types . Survey questions fell into nine categories: 1) Background Info, 2) Farm Description, 3) Operating Expenses and Revenues, 4) Land Access and Tenure, 5) Production and Soil Health, 6) Distribution, 7) “Waste” and Compost, 8) Food Access, and 9) Training, Communications, and Follow Up. There were a few open-ended questions allowing farmers to express what they saw as the three largest challenges facing urban agriculture operations in the area, and policy-relevant suggestions for securing spaces for urban farms and increasing community food security. In addition, we interviewed five urban farmers to deepen our understanding of the social, political, economic, and ecological constraints under which their farms operate. These farmers are particularly involved in networking efforts to strengthen urban farm viability in the East Bay. Four out of five represent locally prominent non-profit farms and one subject represents an alternative cooperatively-run urban farm; three interview subjects are women and two are men. Our study complied with UC Berkeley’s Institutional Review Board protocol for the protection of human subjects and all participants gave consent for participation.Most farms including the UC Oxford Tract and Gill Tract Farms, distribute food to a diverse array of community organizations, . The two aforementioned farms together distribute food to over 50 community organizations, ranging from food pantries to community health groups to native land trusts seeking to feed and reclaim land for those of indigenous heritage. 52% of respondents distribute all food within 5 miles of their farm, while 70% distribute within 10 miles. Produce from each farm site reaches approximately 250 people per week on average during the peak growing season, or approximately 7,000 people from all surveyed farms. Customers reached is moderately correlated with total revenue suggesting a growing impact on CFS as farms access additional income. Farmers reported diversified distribution methods including volunteers harvesting and taking food home , on-site consumption , on-site farm stand distribution, CSA boxes at pick up sites, and volunteers delivering produce directly to distribution sites . Some gleaning and second harvesting occur at urban farms and gardens with potential for growth given reported “unharvested” and “wasted” food percentages.

We then present findings from a survey of 35 diverse urban farm operations in the East Bay

Much of the literature is theoretical, focused on the production potential of urban agriculture, while more work is needed to understand and overcome barriers to access and distribution among communities in need. Without understanding the actual links between UA and food security or which specific characteristics, models or approaches reduce insecurity, urban policymakers and advocates risk backing policies that could have unintended consequences or negative impacts on vulnerable individuals and communities. This literature review explores the intersection between UA and food security to better understand how and to what extent UA addresses food access challenges facing low-income communities in urban areas, and the conditions that either enable or inhibit UA initiatives. The landscape of what constitutes “urban agriculture” is extremely heterogeneous: UA encompasses vertical and rooftop farming, urban foraging, community and residential gardens, and commercial urban farms. Some urban farms operate as for-profit businesses, whereas others operate as nonprofits reliant on grants, subsidies and donations to sustain their operations. For the purposes of city planning, the American Planning Association defines UA as the “production, marketing, and distribution of food and other products in metropolitan areas and at their edges, beyond what is strictly for home consumption or educational purposes” . In its simplest form, UA is “growing food in cities” . We define UA broadly to encompass the full range of activities involved in urban food production including self-production and subsistence agriculture. In doing so, we follow scholars who have sought to measure the contributions of a wide range of UA activities . We see three trends in current scholarship on UA in relation to community food security: a focus on the production potential of urban lands, case studies highlighting various nutritional, health, and other community benefits or outcomes from urban gardening initiatives,trim bin tray and more critical analyses of UA through food justice and equity lenses. Some scholars, for example, have mapped vacant lots in Oakland and backyard gardens in Chicago , predicting yield, to illustrate the production potential of UA.

Others demonstrate, through case studies, the productivity of urban gardens and the value of the food they produce in meeting nutritional needs of low-income communities, particularly households involved in gardening directly . Robust theoretical analyses have emerged critiquing the risks of UA when approached without an equity lens, potentially reinforcing structural injustices and racism and negatively impacting the communities they purportedly serve . Deeper historical and structural challenges including poverty, racism, and divestment in specific communities and neighborhoods are increasingly being recognized as the root causes of the current problem of unequal access to sufficient supplies of safe, nutritious, affordable, and culturally acceptable food facing cities . Designating land for agricultural use in urban areas may conflict with other city planning priorities around affordable housing, gentrification, and living. Because of the persistent legacy of systemic discrimination, it is neither inevitable nor guaranteed that urban agriculture will redress food system inequities; in fact, urban farms can sometimes lead to displacement through eco-gentrification . This is a particularly acute concern in areas experiencing housing pressures and population growth, such as the San Francisco Bay area and New York City. UA can also perpetuate positions of privilege within the food system by benefiting those who already hold power . Critical food systems scholars question, “who really benefits, and who loses in specific efforts to promote urban farms in the ‘sustainable city’ landscape?” and, “how can white food activists reframe their work so as not to fuel displacement of residents of color?” . We examine the role of urban agriculture in addressing food insecurity from a systems perspective, one that considers the policies and institutions that govern the process in which food is produced, processed, distributed and consumed, in order to ask four central questions: How and to what extent are urban produced foods reaching low income consumers, and to what effect? What are the approaches, technologies, institutions and relationships that support or detract from UA in achieving food security goals? What are the political, institutional, cultural, historical, and civic action conditions that enable or inhibit urban agriculture to address food insecurity?

Lastly, How can policies be designed to support the urban farmer in earning a living wage, and support low-income consumers in accessing affordable, locally produced healthy foods? We begin by describing our literature review methodology, followed by a review of the food access and food distribution literatures as they relate to the question of how low-income communities access urban produced food. In the food access literature, we review spatial analyses and other studies that identify challenges and opportunities for expanding healthy food access in low-income communities, with a particular focus on urban produced foods. Next, we explore what is understood about the distribution of urban-produced foods especially the challenges and tradeoffs urban farmers face between securing a viable income and meeting the food needs of low-income customers. Lastly, we bring together the literatures on access to and distribution of urban produced foods to identify effective strategies urban farms employ to meet food access needs of urban communities. Our analysis reveals three key factors mediating the effect of UA on food security: the economic realities of achieving an economically viable urban farm, the role of city policy and planning, and the importance of civic engagement in the urban food system. We seek to highlight examples from both the scholarly and gray literatures that demonstrate how UA can improve food access, distribution, and justice, in a way that supports both consumers and producers of food in cities. Results of this systematic review will guide a three-year research project to investigate and address urban food access challenges in the eastern region of the San Francisco Bay Area, where interest in UA abounds, yet levels of gentrification, food insecurity, and income inequality are growing.Our systematic review of the food access and distribution literature builds on critical food systems research in order to better understand when, where and how urban agriculture can improve food access and dismantle structures that perpetuate inequality within the larger food system. We focus on literature from the United States, in order to generate ideas relevant to the political climate surrounding city and regional planners in this country, but results are applicable for comparison or potential transferability in other countries as well. We consider both peer reviewed scholarship and gray literature from food policy organizations Urban Food Policy Institute, Detroit Food Policy Council, and Race Forward). Both theoretical scholarship and case studies are drawn out below to illustrate the question of whether UA improves food access . Building on a set of 150 articles from the researchers’ personal databases , we added an additional 200 sources from five months of Google Alerts for “urban agriculture” and from bibliographies of articles in the database. The Google Alerts provided valuable additions from new studies, local news outlets,pollen trim tray and gray literature. In many ways, the Google Alerts service better captures current trends and innovative ideas in urban agriculture than the scholarly literature, and points out important areas for future academic study, especially with respect to novel distribution methods, technology, and food recovery efforts. For example, topics such as mobile food trucks, gleaning, “agrihood” developments, participatory urban food forest projects, online food exchanges , and food distribution apps receive better coverage in local news outlets than the current body of peer reviewed literature, where these emerging ideas are largely absent. Many of the online platforms that allow farmers and backyard gardeners to sell, donate, or receive volunteer harvest assistance represent especially promising areas for future scholarly research .

We used this body of literature to generate a list of key terms for several Web of Science searches to systematically identify the peer-reviewed literature from 1900 to present. The dataset construction and selection criteria are summarized in Figure 11.Other searches for key terms relating to food access including “food justice”, “food security”, “food sovereignty”, “food apartheid”, and “critical food geographies” added small numbers of articles to our systematic review. Terms were chosen based off keyword lists from articles in the database and results were screened for geographic relevance and mention of urban produced foods. These terms and search results bring up important questions of who prefers and uses which terms, and why. The struggle over terminology mirrors broader struggles for control, power, and self-determination. Going beyond ‘food security’, the term “food sovereignty” originates from La Via Campesina and the predominantly rural small producers movement in the 1990s; it is applied to the urban space by scholars such as Alkon and Mares and Block et al. as a distinctly political concept that is “a transformative process . . . to recreate the democratic realm and regenerate a diversity of autonomous food systems based on equity, social justice, and ecological sustainability” . Those who use “food apartheid” aim to directly implicate the segregation that is reproduced in the modern food system and food movements with respect to who can access healthy, locally produced food along racial lines . These scholars foreground issues of race in their analyses in effort to name and dismantle racist legacies in the food system. To identify the body of literature pertaining to the distribution of urban-produced foods, it was necessary to expand our search terms beyond “urban agriculture” and “food distribution”, and start with “food systems”, “distribution”, and “urban” as key search terms. We then filtered the results of this search to exclude articles pertaining solely to location of supermarkets in food deserts, a common area of research but not the focus of this study . We also conducted searches for “urban foodshed” , “alternative food networks”, “informal food distribution” and “short food supply chains”, in order to track down missing literature from our collection investigating the transfers of food produced in cities. This iterative search process on the distribution side reveals the difficulties in tracking informal food distribution networks, but also the importance of doing so to better understand the real impact of urban agriculture on food insecurity in cities. Data analysis comprised content analysis of article abstracts to identify key findings among the case studies considered, and closer reading of other review articles to identify trends and gaps in the literature. Themes were extracted from articles considered, and grouped by study type to determine which types of studies provide which data.Community food security is defined by the Community Food Security Coalition as “all persons obtaining at all times a culturally acceptable, nutritionally adequate diet through local non-emergency sources”, with urban agriculture playing an important but integrated role in this effort. According to Horst et al. , expanding urban agriculture operations across cities “does not guarantee that people experiencing food insecurity will access that food…Distribution and access matter.” Food access, closely related to the term food security, constitutes the process of obtaining certain foods and includes educational, cultural, geographic, and economic dimensions. The literature on fresh food access in low-income communities often focuses on food desert analyses studying lack of grocery stores; however, focusing on “lack of stores” does not address historical under investment patterns and underlying structural causes of food insecurity and oversimplifies the solutions landscape . Other literature studies efforts to bring in fresh food through farmers markets locating in underserved communities, or through offering fresh produce in corner stores . Both efforts have met with limited success . Less is known about the actual consumption of urban produced foods by low-income communities. When certain literature reviews claim that urban agriculture improves food access among food insecure households and communities, it is often from a productivist conceptualization of “access.” This productivist focus in the literature conflates existence of urban farms with increased access, without examining where the food actually goes and who consumes it. As critical food scholarship points out, “the focus of food access as an issue goes beyond the particular connections to health to be a way that issues of power, control, and inequality are written into the American landscape” . Below we outline barriers to accessing urban produced foods, including physical proximity, cost of food, cost of land, cultural acceptability, and nutrition education, identified from an interdisciplinary body of literature spanning urban agroecology, public health, development economics and food geography.

A key local input is the high-quality compost produced at Midnight’s Farm

Construction of greenhouses and hoop houses and commercial kitchens has enabled year-round production and preservation of the agricultural bounty. The average size of farms has decreased to 58 acres as the focus is more on small vegetable production than meat operations. Average market value of products sold per farm has decreased as well to just over $13,000, although once farm expenses are factored in, net farm income is -$6,293 . Small scale heritage grain production has re-emerged on several islands, which represents an exciting step towards relocalizing important food supply chains and reclaiming sovereignty that has been taken away from communities through consolidation of food “commodities” . Grains comprise the largest acreage of certified organic crop production in San Juan County at approximately 200 acres in production . Grains also represent new revenue stream for farmers taking advantage of growing interest in sourcing local grains among local bakeries and restaurants. A talk at the San Juan Agricultural summit in 2019 on farming history in the San Juan concluded with the statement that “it is a myth you can’t make a living farming in the islands, but the successful people have been those who have innovated and shown their savvy at investing in new varieties or types of crop and in contacting distant specialty markets” .The aging farmer population and farmland transition dilemmas on Lopez are challenges mirrored in agricultural communities nationwide, encompassing both large industrial and smaller scale operations. Several of the island’s most successful farms are led by farmers in their 50s, 60s, and 70s,procona system without a clear plan of who will take over as the current owner-operators seek to retire. Few of the farmers on the island have children interested in taking over the farm.

The primary mechanisms for farm transfer and new farm establishment are through LCLT, the San Juan Islands Ag Guild, and the real estate market for island farmland. LCLT works towards three goals related to land access: affordable housing, sustainable communities, and farmland conservation. Their most recent initiative, the Lopez Island Farm Trust , was formed in 2018 to spearhead farmland conservation work. LIFT aims to strengthen the local food system and provide affordable access to land through a “comprehensive legal, ethical, and economically viable land lease system.” LIFT seeks to acquire, lease and manage new and historical farms; provide education for beginning farmers; foster business opportunities for regenerative agriculture operations; and encourage multi-generational living on the land . LCLT plans to use the affordable lease template as a model for securing and transitioning other farmland parcels, whether gifts or purchases, to the next generation of regenerative farmers. Ensuring the success of the newly leased Stonecrest Farm operation is essential to the continuation of this work, as facilitating a smooth transition to a new family operation is inherently challenging. It remains to be seen how replicable the Stonecrest Farm purchase is, or the degree to which it can serve as an affordable land access model, due to the difficulty for the land trust to raise large sums of money on a regular basis; “it was a big lift for us,” says LCLT Community Liaison Rhea Miller, of the fundraising effort to purchase Stonecrest. The Ag Guild recently received a three-year Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development grant from the USDA to research and improve access to farmland for new and beginning farmers. The grant collaboration included WSU SJC Extension, the Northwest Ag Business Center, Whidbey Island Conservation District, and the Organic Farm School farmer training program on Whidbey Island. As part of the grant activities, staff at the Ag Guild conduct outreach with beginning farmers interested in accessing farmland and establishing operations in the San Juan Islands, and posts opportunities for farmland access on its website’s “Farmers-to-Farmland” page .

The outreach process includes connecting farmers to suitable farmland parcels and providing relevant information about available water sources, markets, local contacts, and housing options. In some cases, aspiring farmers have decided that the location is not suited to their needs. Rather than seeing this as a failure, ensuring opportunity to opt out is an important part of the farmland succession process and ultimately setting up new farmers for success . Recognizing and overcoming challenges of a specific context is an essential part of farmland transitions, with some challenges more easily overcome than others . In most cases, the land tenure for new farmers would be through lease agreements, rather than ownership models, as much of the farmland available in the county is owned by the Land Bank, Preservation Trust, or private individuals open to leasing arrangements with aspiring farmers. There is a divide between the landowning and land leasing populations, with many young people not able to afford to buy into an ownership arrangement. Currently on Lopez, most farmland in operation is leased rather than owned . This creates instability and precarity around sustaining the future of farming on the island. Pathways to cooperative and collective ownership5 of farmland as a land access opportunity are largely absent in the Lopez case study and throughout the Pacific Northwest. Ag Guild staff are very open to the idea of supporting more farmers, both current and new, in establishing cooperative enterprises. Organic Farm School directors are similarly encouraging of this idea, arguing that many new farmers might not be ready to take over an 80-acre parcel of land and put it to productive use immediately, but it might be more appropriate for a group of five to divide up vegetable production, flower production, poultry production, grazing and value added products6. Distributing the risk, responsibilities, and knowledge-intensive labor among partners is a yet-to-be-thoroughly-tested strategy for overcoming some of the land access challenges facing farmers in the San Juan Island region.Agroecology rests upon an essential foundation of building healthy soil, through ecological cultivation of plants, insects, and food webs governed by the “Law of Return” creating a rich network of life on the farm. On Lopez, land clearing for farming, homesteading, and haying posed a threat to the island’s biological and pedologic resource base starting in the late 19th century with the arrival of European-Americans. Today, there is growing attention around restoring and revitalizing soils, forestland, and ecosystem services. Farms such as Midnight’s Farm are managing land for three purposes: healthy food production, economic viability, and soil carbon storage . Other farms are following suit, seeking to build soil and revitalize land that has been degraded especially from repeated haying. The soils on the island vary across short distances, from sandy and well-drained hilltops to heavy clay and moisture-retaining wetlands. The island geology is mostly rock, with a thin soil layer, not considered ideal for farming activities. In the words of one farmer, “we don’t have much rich farmland for row crops on Lopez, so most of us are in a constant dance to balance income-producing crops with inputs to improve the soil and, therefore, the harvest” .

Farmers and ranchers are involved in a suite of soil-building practices out of necessity for maintaining productive small-scale operations year after year. These practices include compost production and application, cover cropping, bio-char production and co-composting, crop rotations, intercropping ,procona valencia buckets managed rotational grazing, minimal- or no-till cultivation, and combinations of perennial and annual plantings with animals to create a diverse ecological farming system that takes less than it gives back to the ultimate life-source: the soil. Farmers receive support, training, and information from researchers at WSU SJC Extension, SJICD, and through annual farmer to farmer workshops. Several farmers collaborated in 2015 to host a visit from the Soil Carbon Coalition’s Peter Donovan in order to sample local soils as a baseline and collect additional samples in later years to measure carbon storage, an important component of soil health. WSU researchers offer regular guidance and workshops around crop rotations and pasture management to improve island soils. Recently, WSU partnered with local farmers and the local bakery to host a Field Day on small scale grain production, part of a soil-building rotation that can enhance fertility in concert with legumes and other crops. Other WSU researchers collaborated on a successfully funded Western Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education grant proposal with five local producers to explore the use of bio-char co-composted with cattle bedding and other woody biomass materials as a soil amendment, which will be applied in experimental trial plots beginning in summer 2020 . The SJICD received a WA State Department of Ecology grant to purchase a no-till seed drill that is shared among islands, and recently used in a sequence of liming and seeding Lopez pastures with diverse seed mixes to restore grassland soil health. While the support and education provided by local agriculture and conservation organizations is essential, there is a constant need for further financial resources to extend and improve educational initiatives and technology pilots.Related to efforts of building healthy soil through crop rotations and appropriate farming decisions, farmers on Lopez are taking steps to provide their own inputs for crop production that do not need to be imported or purchased from off island. At a Department of Ecology-approved facility, the farm produces compost from forest and agricultural debris dropped off from across the island, grinding, composting, and screening materials in an aerated static pile system to create a finished product that is widely applied to local croplands. Manure and bedding material from the farm’s cattle, pigs, and chickens are valuable feed stocks to the composting process as well. Midnight’s produces over 600 yards of compost annually, which is all applied to Lopez agricultural lands and gardens. Farms also self-compost, recycling waste products in smaller decentralized systems and supplementing with purchased composts.

Animals also play a role: “Our pigs really close the loop for us on the farm,” one farmer stated, referring to food and plant scraps she was feeding to her American Guinea hogs who were in the midst of transforming it into high quality meat . More recently, due to wildfire risk mitigation efforts, the island has begun to selectively remove and burn some trees in a controlled, limited oxygen environment to create local bio-char, a potentially valuable soil amendment with implications for increased soil carbon sequestration. Current production is happening at a very small scale, but regional interest in larger-scale bio-char production abounds. Midnight’s Farm initiated a research collaboration between WSU extension, U.C. Berkeley, and five local producers from across Western Washington to address the question: can bio-char be a multi-use farm product that improves farm-based co-composted products and vegetable production, and promotes soil C sequestration? Two regionally sourced bio-chars will be applied to cattle bedding at Midnight’s Farm, and then the bio-char-bedding will be co-composted with other on-farm feed stocks to produce a bio-char-enhanced compost product. Through absorbing Nitrogen and other nutrients from the cattle bedding, the “charged” bio-char is intended to provide valuable fertilizer-like qualities to the compost, reducing the need for other amendments to cropping fields. The research hypotheses are: 1) blending bio-char into cow bedding will result in greater N retention, reducing the potential for environmental loss, 2) adding the bio-char bedding blend to compost will increase nutrient content, thereby adding value to the compost product, and that 3) compost with bio-char as a feed stock will lead to increased soil carbon, cation exchange capacity, and pH when applied to soil . The research team will measure impacts on manure handling, composting, soil quality and crop yields, following field application trials on two local farms . Data will be collected in Spring 2020 on soil profiles before amendment, and again in Fall 2020 on soils and crop yields. The research underway is based on prior work from local bio-char researcher Kai Hoffman-Krull and others, who have worked with universities in Washington and Montana over the past five years investigating on-farm bio-char soil amendments. They have found through field trials on nearby Waldron Island, WA, that in addition to improving soil C storage, locally produced bio-chars have potential to “significantly improve soil fertility and crop productivity in organic farming systems on sandy soils” . However, there remains controversy around the impacts of bio-char in disparate contexts, evidenced by several meta-analyses pointing out varied outcomes based on pyrolysis and feed stock conditions , and differential effects of in temperate vs. tropical soils . Both meta-analyses call for further study in diverse geographic contexts of interest.