A argument for an adapted EOV for mosaic landscapes
An edited version of this blog was published by the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario (here).
Thorsten Arnold, August 2021
But when I consider that the nobler animals have been exterminated here -the cougar, panther, lynx, wolverine, wolf, bear, moose, deer, the beaver, the turkey, etc., etc. – I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed, and as it were, emasculated country… I listen to a concert in which so many parts are wanting… for instance, thinking that I have here the entire poem, and then, to my chagrin, I hear that it is but an imperfect copy that I possess and have read, that my ancestors have torn out many of the first leaves and grandest passages…
.Henry David Thoreau, Journal, 1856
For EFAO, I recently conducted a feasibility study about establishing Ecological Outcome Verification (EOV) in larger parts of Ontario. EOV is a monitoring method for Holistic Management of land – or really, a monitoring method for ANY land management. A recurring challenge posed itself: Managing for what? What type of landscape do “we” envision in our part of this world? Landscape management has a strong normative aspect – it became clear that we really cannot take strategic steps toward land regeneration without defining a direction that we want the land to move toward! And I also learned that Ontario’s landscape is fundamentally different than the grasslands for which EOV was developed. How can we bring the great opportunities of EOV to Ontario’s ecoregion context?
When exploring what type of landscape we should regenerate for in South-Western Ontario, my starting point is the not-so-recent past. Around 250 years ago, the region where I live was a dense deciduous forest, dominated by large trees, interspersed with wetlands. Dominating trees were maples, white pines, elms, ashes, black cherries, cedars, spruces… varieties that we know from our forests today. However, if I look back further into the past, the earliest settlers would have found a different landscape at times of first contact. Indeed, in Southwestern Ontario, the dense forest took hold in its landscape once settler diseases killed more than 90% of the Indigenous population. Within only 50 years, the diseases brought by colonizers spread in about ten waves, one deadlier than the other: malaria in 1513, small pocks in 1520, measles and typhoid in 1528, bubonic plague in 1545, mumps in 1550, and influenza in 1559 – each one of these diseases hitting a population without prior exposure to the pestilence, each killing on average 25% percent of the population ([i]). Native cultures shifted to perpetual survival mode – many deeper cultural meanings were lost. Even during the COVID pandemic, it remains impossible for me to imagine the suffering and trauma that these diseases have brought over the Native populations and their cultures. This collapse of indigenous cultures also ended millennia of indigenous land management. The closed-canopy forests that many consider Ontario’s “wilderness” really reflects only a blip in natural history – the short period between indigenous land management and Western settlement.
John Riley’s book The Once and Future Great Lakes Country gives the best ecological history that I am aware of. It is based on the written accounts of earliest explorers who still witnessed quite different landscapes in the temperate regions around the Great Leaks. The stretch that we now call “Lake Erie toward Toronto” was dominated by Savannah-type pastureland trees – giant oaks, butter and hickory nuts with lots of fruit and berries, and large open grasslands in between. Further north, the Savannah morphed into open woodlands that still offered plenty of grazing grounds, interspersed with ample beaver-populated wetland bush and in between, patches of dense, old-growth forest. In the language of modern ecologists, the landscape was a mosaic of successions. Some areas were young after wildfire disturbance, others were later succession stages as ecosystems had recovered, and there were patches of old “climax” close-canopy forest that were not affected by indigenous burning practices. It is these transitions between succession stages that characterized our “mosaic landscape”: Over time, species communities of plants and animals are evolving everywhere towards their climax system. Over space, landscapes transition from one succession stage to another, with frequent variations in vegetation height and sun penetration. This offered a variety of feeding grounds and hiding spots. This spatial and temporal mosaic of succession stages brought along habitat & species diversity that we today can hardly imagine. These vegetation gradients and edges, which ecologists call “ecotones”, bring out life in its fullest vigor. And in the context of our temperate Great Lakes Country, these ecotones are the dominant habitat feature in a mosaic landscape, bribing out more diversity than any “climax” landscape can offer.
Mosaic landscapes reflect an equilibrium of permanent change, driven by succession after disturbance. Each ecological community continuously matures toward a higher succession stage: Bare soil is quickly covered with early succession plants that we call “weeds”: fast-growing annuals that put most of their efforts into seed production. Perennial “weeds” follow, as do grasses and shrubs. First trees emerge – usually fast-growing, shade-intolerant species like aspens, crap apples, white birches. Later come ashes and cedars, then the slower-growing shade-tolerant species that characterize “climax forests”: sugar maples, beeches and hemlocks wait for gaps in the canopy and quickly fill in, until they dominate the forest. Succession would stop right at this climax and terminate the mosaic — unless it is disturbed. Disturbance events exist at all scales: they may come from large trees falling over, landslides or flooding, heavy storms or wild fires, groups of mammoths that knock over trees, human slash-and-burn agriculture, or modern logging activity. In an ecologically healthy mosaic landscape, there is balance between community succession and disturbances events, in a way that creates a transient equilibrium. A bit like a street market where vendors change while the market maintains its bustling and colorful character. We want to manage for this bustling and for this colorfulness – neither for a particular vendor (an individuum) or a specific type of vendor (a species).
In many parts of the temperate world, mosaic landscapes used to dominate. Studies report mosaics in Japan ([1]), the New England states in the US ([2]), Canada’s Nova Scotia ([3]), and indigenous Australia ([4]). In central Europe, government policy once promoted orchard meadows landscapes as bulwark against marauding armies, in order to build food systems resiliency. As a side effect, these diversified landscapes also became Europe’s biodiversity hotspot – a rare beneficial outcome of Western landscape-scale government interventions ([5])! Worldwide, land managed by indigenous peoples still protects approximately 85% of the world’s biodiversity, even though they make up less than 5% of the world’s population. Much of this is attributed to long-term and widespread relationships with fire, and its use for managing landscapes as mosaics ([6]).
Climate change gives mosaic landscapes a new urgency. Foresters now identify European-style forest management in North America – homogeneous stands of same-age trees – as one of the root causes why wildfires have become so severe, large, and destructive. Advocates promote to revive the Indigenous craft of cultural burns (e.g. The Narwhale, Sept 2020), a context-based practice that promoted the burning small areas for multiple benefits, in awareness of the disturbance-succession dynamics of a landscape. Indigenous knowledge keepers used low-intensity burns for several purposes simultaneously: burns reduced the load of dead biomass on the ground. In spring burns, ashes removed dead grasses and blacked the sol, leading to an earlier flash of vegetation that attracted grazing animals for hunting. Burns kept landscapes open without damaging old trees, fostered diversity of habitat and biological communities, and prevented the disastrous forest fires we are experiencing today. In Canada, a return to cultural burning practices may be our only option, as the climate crisis is fueling wildfires at unprecedented frequency and scale – and would inevitably bring back mosaic landscapes.
When managing for landscape resilience on an ecological farm, I believe that concept of landscape mosaics can provide us a guiding compass for our decision making. We can assume that a more diverse mosaic that is rich in edges/ecotones will come along with increased biodiversity and overall resilience. The concept reconnects us to traditional indigenous landuse practices, without attempting to force us “back in time”: lost ecosystems cannot be restored as species have invaded and climate is shifting. But we can revitalize the fundamental character of biodiverse mosaic landscapes – in ways that assists our quickly shifting ecoregions in our warming climate, regenerates biodiversity, and fosters societal resilience.
Mosaic landscapes pose a deep challenge to Savory Institute’s EOV methodology. The EOV was originally developed for homogeneous grassland landscapes with shifting biological community mosaics, so ranchers mainly focused their attention to these communities within their fields. In temperate regions with our forest ecology, ecological health needs to be examined from the perspective of our landscape mosaics. This exceeds the extent of a pasture, which Savory’s EOV would be examining. Instead, an EOV that is adapted for mosaic landscapes would have to take into account landscape connectivity features such as hedgerows and windbreaks, streams and rivers, bushes and woodlands, and wet areas. It would look at the age and species composition of the hedgerow that surrounds a field. It would look at habitat provided by surrounding features – nesting opportunities, food sources and hiding spots during disruptive events.
Where are we going next?
Most aspects of Savory’s EOV can be maintained for farm health monitoring around soil health, water cycle impacts, and mineral cycling. Then, well established methods could complement Savory’s original EOV to address ecological health from a landscape mosaic perspective: farm habitat health assessment, hedgerow health assessment, and pollinator habitat methods are either well-established in Ontario, or may be borrowed from similar jurisdictions (Ireland, the UK). Indicator species – maybe birds, amphibians or snakes? – can indicate the complexity of biological communities. And fortunately, we farmers don’t need a perfect methodology – we need one that helps us manage better and that is easy. Personally, I believe that the abundance of toads in a field, the age composition and diversity of trees and bushes in nearby hedgerows/windbreaks, access to a water source, and the availability of nesting & feeding grounds for a diversity of insects, should take us a long way towards an “EOV for mosaic landscapes”.
Savory’s original EOV is developed for mosaic communities within relatively homogeneous grassland landscapes. Translating this method into Ontario’s context first requires that we explicitly define a desirable landscape that we want to manage for – I argued for the concept of “mosaic landscape”. Secondly, we need to complement Savory’s EOV methodology with assessment methods that characterize the desirability of our landscape. This requires some research – and hands-on trial and error.
I believe that ecological outcome verification is amongst the most urgent and powerful methods to promote regenerative agriculture that stays true to its values. Our niche sector is facing all sorts of co-options – ministries prefer supporting specific management practices or technologies; corporations water down “regeneration”, and even we ourselves cannot legitimately claim to be “regenerative” without proving regenerative outcomes. A location-adapted EOV could level the ground – someone will need to take this on. I believe that it would be a fantastic project for EFAO to take on: We have the values, the farmers who share these values. And EFAO has built considerable research capacity for on-farm research. Let’s use it for a better, contextual EOV that measures regenerative outcomes!
[1] Forman RT. Land Mosaics: The ecology of landscapes and regions (1995). The Ecological Design and Planning Reader; IslandPress: Washington, DC, USA. 2014 Dec 22:217-34.
[2] Oehler JD, Covell DF, Capel S, Long B, editors. Managing grasslands, shrublands, and young forest habitats for wildlife: a guide for the Northeast. Northeast Upland Habitat Technical Committee, Massachusetts Division of Fisheries & Wildlife; 2006.
[3] Stewart B, Neilly P. A procedural guide for ecological landscape analysis. Nova Scotia: Truro, NS, Canada. 2008 Feb 29.
[4] Brook BW, Bowman DM. Postcards from the past: charting the landscape-scale conversion of tropical Australian savanna to closed forest during the 20th century. Landscape Ecology. 2006 Nov;21(8):1253-66.
[5] Rotherham, I. D. (2008). Orchards and groves: Their history, ecology, culture and archaeology. In I. D. Rotherham I.D. (Ed.), Landscape archaeology and ecology (Volume 7). Sheffield, U.K.: Wildtrack Publishing
[6] Hoffman KM, Davis EL, Wickham SB, Schang K, Johnson A, Larking T, Lauriault PN, Le NQ, Swerdfager E, Trant AJ. Conservation of Earth’s biodiversity is embedded in Indigenous fire stewardship. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2021 Aug 10;118(32).
[i] John L. Riley, The Once And Future Great Lakes Country – An Ecological History (p. 33, citing the anthropologist Henry Dobyns)
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