Part 3: Biomimicry in Land Management Practice Design
Ok, But What Can I Do? Information and Inspiration towards Nature-Based Land Stewardship Perspectives and Practices
(Image Source: Photo by Anne LaForti)
Biomimicry in Land Management Practice Design
In the same way that we can design innovations for decreasing bird collisions or increasing wind turbine fan blade energy production, we can design land management practices by modeling our design after how nature would care for the land.
Water - Slow it, Spread it, Sink it
Through the damming and diverting of springs, Beavers are a keystone species: they create conditions conducive to life. The flooding that follows damming provides a cozy habitat for willow and aspen trees, which beavers prefer for winter food and for building their beaver lodges. If we’re looking to provide abundant water to a landscape, we can follow the beaver’s lead by slowing, spreading, and sinking water. By allowing water to flow over as much distance as possible, and as slowly as possible, we allow the water to sink into the soil before it runs away. When water can slow down and sink into the soil, it can help fill aquifers and prevent droughts. This also prevents water from collecting toxins as it rolls into gutters and eventually empties into waterways.
Protect the Soil like a Forest Floor
Go on a hike in the forest, and you’ll see the ways that nature cares for and protects the soil. Nature limits the disturbance of the soil and covers it with a protective layer. Nature encourages diversity by integrating plants and animals, and keeping roots growing in the ground as much as possible.
Limit Disturbance
Most soil in the forest has existed in its place for many years. Over the life of the forest, the soil has developed a thriving, living ecosystem with organisms in deep relationships with each other, building soil structure, aeration, and deposits of plant available nutrients.
When soil is disturbed, those relationships and structures are bulldozed and the community must rebuild over time. Each time the soil is tilled, it releases carbon into the atmosphere as CO2, contributing to additional greenhouse gasses.
All natural materials exist in the life cycle of an ecosystem and eventually decompose to turn into resources for the next generation of life. When harsh, toxic chemicals are spread into a soil ecosystem, they act as an extreme disturbance - killing the flora and fauna, and funga and sterilizing the soil. The chemicals eventually wash into waterways and poison life on their way through a watershed either through the chemicals themselves, or the toxic algal blooms caused by fertilizer runoff.
Apply Armor
Protective debris covers most of the soil in a forest. Leaves, pine needles, and other organic materials protect the soil by creating a buffer layer.
The wind that blows over unprotected soil can take the top layer of soil and blow it away as dust, eroding the topsoil over time. Armor protects soil as a boundary layer, creating a windbreak so that erosive breezes are a safe distance away from the fragile soil surface.
Rain seems harmless, but will erode soil with every drop, contributing to topsoil washing away with each storm. Armor also protects soil from rain, so that water drops onto the debris on the surface and slowly follows gravity down to the soil, lessening the physical impact on soil structure.
Pieces of organic matter that protect the soil surface are sources of food for soil dwellers. Earthworms love to grab dead leaves and pull them under the soil surface to consume as food. Fungi digest wood and plant materials, then themselves become food or transfer nutrients into the soil for plants and microbes. The structure of this debris is so low to the ground it also becomes shelter and habitat for soil dwellers.
Encourage Diversity
There’s no such thing as a monoculture in nature. Forests are filled with a variety of plants and animals.
Each species has evolved its own relationships with other plants and animals in a forest ecosystem. The more diversity of organisms in an ecosystem, the more likely it is to thrive and be resilient to disturbances and disruption.
Diversity of life should be present at the scale of large animals, small animals, down to insects and plants, and even soil microbes. Different plants have different functions for which they provide ecosystem services (Grasses, Legumes, Forbes, Shrubs, Trees). Different plant structures can capture sunlight using different shapes.
Plant roots can be short and shallow, long and deep, fibrous and tough, or fragile and easily regenerated. More diversity brings more food sources to the food web and more variety of organic matter for decomposition.
Living Roots in the Ground page sketch
(Image Sources: Hand Drawn by Anne LaForti)
Ensure Living Roots
Growing plants with roots in the ground are required for soil health. As plants grow, they shuttle up to 30-40% of their carbon down their roots and out to the microbes that live in the soil. Without living roots, those sugary carbon exudates aren’t available to feed the soil, leading to weaker communities of helpful soil microbes.
To make nutrients plant-available, they must be cycled through the soil food web before they can be delivered to the plant as easily absorbable.
Cover crops can support farmers while their fields are resting between cash crops. Their cover crops continue to feed the soil biology in the off-season.
The cycle of plants absorbing energy from the sun, turning it into carbohydrate (sugar) root exudates to provide to the soil microbes as food.
(image source: http://fibershed.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/carbon-cycle-revised2-494x511.jpg)
Integrate Animals (and Microbes)
You will never see a natural area without animals. Animals are required for natural systems (a forest, a prairie, etc.) and therefore animals are required for human-designed natural systems.
Grazing ruminant animals help trigger plant re-growth, which shuttles more carbon into the soil to feed the soil microbes. With their guts full of microbes (which allow them to digest grasses), they also contribute valuable soil biology inoculation with the urine and feces of the animals. The microbes from their guts get into the soil, and the microbes from the soil get into their guts. This is a symbiotic microbe community. The cows need the grass, and the grass needs the cows.
Heavy hoofed animals can break up the seal on top of dried, soil-capped areas, allowing small crevices in the ground to collect moisture from dew or rain. These crevices also allow long-dormant native seeds to germinate and grow.
When cows eat grass, they wrap their tongues around it and tug it taught, to cut it against their bottom teeth. When they tug, it tugs the entire grass plant a bit, breaking off the tips of the roots. These bits of root tip are now a buffet for hungry microbes that bring minerals and nutrients close to the root ends where they can be pulled into the plant.
Pollinators are key to the health of your local ecosystem - not only do they pollinate 75% of our fruits and vegetables, but they also provide for cross-pollination and a mixing of traits for deeper adaptability and resilience.
Worms play a powerful role by digesting organic materials (leaves, fruit, etc.) and making nutrients bioavailable for plants. They aerate the soil allowing air and water to pass through the tunnels, as well as creating a habitat for microbes. If you see worms in your soil, that can be an indicator of soil health.
Predator insects are valuable to keep the circle of life turning for insect populations. Like predator birds, predator insects can help keep “pest” insect populations at reasonable levels.
Even if you don’t have domesticated animals on the land, increasing biodiversity means you’re increasing the different organisms that live on that land, including microbes.
(Image Source: Photo by Anne LaForti)
Simplified visual explanation of the soil food web.
(Image source: https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_MEDIA/nrcs142p2_049822.jpg)
Nutrient Cycling
Nutrient Cycling is the process by which nutrients flow through and to plants and other organisms in the soil food web. Nutrient cycling is a bit like the blood flowing through our human bodies. Without the constant recirculation of nutrients throughout our bodies, they cannot work properly and shut down. Jon Stika puts is so well in his book, The Soil Owner’s Manual, when he says,
“It is the biology that builds the physical structure of the soil and regulates the chemical processes in the soil. Without biology, the soil is simply geology.
Like all the muscles, valves, and arteries in our own heart, it’s all the small moving parts in the soil that make it run. To keep the heart of our soil running, we must understand how all the parts work together and how to keep them healthy and functioning to be productive and sustainable.”
Biodiversity
Biodiversity is the variety of life that exists within an area or region. The Amazon Rainforests are some of the most biodiverse places on the planet - chock full of different animals, plants, fungi, and microbes all living in the same spaces, finding food and shelter within the community.
Diversity in a system (including form, process, or systems) provides additional opportunities to solve functional challenges and adapt to current conditions.
Succession
Succession is the orderly transformation and changes in the composition of a community from the earliest stages of bare ground to the latest stages of a climax community (such as an old-growth forest).
Lower in succession, the soil is more bacterially dominated and can support more annual plants and grasses (weeds). Further along, soils gradually become balanced, then tip the scales to a more fungally dominant soil that better supports trees and shrubs.
Brittleness
Brittleness has to do with the seasonal distribution and amount of rain and humidity, along with the temperature.
In certain places if you leave an area to fallow and return to nature, it will become desertified if the soil isn’t protected and plants are grazed by ruminant animals -- this is called a brittle environment. The lower the proportion of the year that is humid, the higher the area is on the Brittleness scale. (Think Southwestern US). In other climates, when you leave the land to fallow and return to nature, it becomes a thick, vibrant forest - this is called a non-brittle environment. (Think Midwestern and Northeastern US).
Brittleness Scale shows the difference between “Arid” and “Brittle”
(Image Source: Allan Savory and Jody Butterfield, Holistic Management, pg. 31)
Ecotones
Ecotones are edge spaces where one biome joins and transitions to another biome. These cross-over spaces are often home to the most biodiversity in a landscape. For example, where a grassy pasture transitions to rocky foothills -- where they touch and overlap, like a Venn diagram, provides ample opportunities for adaptation and niche differentiation.
Ecotones are like a ven diagram where the zones overlap.
(Image source: https://neostencil.com/ecotone)
How might you incorporate these patterns into the way you manage land?
This is part 3 of the manuscript I drafted for the final project of my Biomimicry master’s degree. I feel it could help you to understand the impact that each of us can have on our hyper-local ecosystems as we step toward stewardship practices that heal the soil.
— Anne LaForti —
I am making this series of content free for all readers and all subscription levels. If you’d like to support more content like this, please consider sharing this post or becoming a free or paid subscriber. I’m so glad you’re here. Thank you.