Agricultural implications of providing soil-based constraints on urban expansion: Land use forecasts to 2050

JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT

卷:217

Article

Smidt, Samuel J.¹  Tayyebi, Amin²  Kendall, Anthony D.¹  Pijanowski, Bryan C.³  Hyndman, David W.¹ 

[1] Michigan State Univ, Dept Earth & Environm Sci, E Lansing, MI 48824 USA

[2] Monsanto Co, Geospatial Big Data Engineer, St Louis, MO 63146 USA

[3] Purdue Univ, Forestry & Nat Resources Dept, W Lafayette, IN 47907 USA

关键词: Urbanization;    Land transformation model;    Soil conservation;    Land use change;    Urban planning;    Agriculture;   

DOI  :  10.1016/j.jenvman.2018.03.042

来源: Elsevier

【 摘 要 】

Urbanization onto adjacent farmlands directly reduces the agricultural area available to meet the resource needs of a growing society. Soil conservation is a common objective in urban planning, but little focus has been placed on targeting soil value as a metric for conservation. This study assigns commodity and water storage values to the agricultural soils across all of the watersheds in Michigan's Lower Peninsula to evaluate how cities might respond to a soil conservation-based urbanization strategy. Land Transformation Model (LTM) simulations representing both traditional and soil conservation-based urbanization, are used to forecast urban area growth from 2010 to 2050 at five year intervals. The expansion of urban areas onto adjacent farmland is then evaluated to quantify the conservation effects of soil-based development. Results indicate that a soil-based protection strategy significantly conserves total farmland, especially more fertile soils within each soil type. In terms of revenue, similar to$88 million (in current dollars) would be conserved in 2050 using soil-based constraints, with the projected savings from 2011 to 2050 totaling more than $1.5 billion. Soil-based urbanization also increased urban density for each major metropolitan area. For example, there were 94,640 more acres directly adjacent to urban land by 2050 under traditional development compared to the soil-based urbanization strategy, indicating that urban sprawl was more tightly contained when including soil value as a metric to guide development. This study indicates that implementing a soil-based urbanization strategy would better satisfy future agricultural resource needs than traditional urban planning. (C) 2018 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

【 授权许可】

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