rot_collective transcription: Biophysical Setting and Stewardship
Note to readers: This post is part of a process of providing text-based and occasionally longer form versions of the posts on rot_collective on instagram. This is to improve accessibility for those using screen readers/TTS and those who prefer to not click through images. As a bonus this also provides a way for us to dynamically update or correct information in posts - that’s really important to us because we don’t want to be leading people towards incorrect information in their landscape practices. Keep in mind however that this means the posts may deviate from the original infographics, and so don’t fully replace post captioning 1x1.
Depending on our energy and time, these posts may be pushed together into a single document for those who want a long read. But our timeframe of publishing these / eventually merging them is totally unknown - we work day jobs and it’s the growing season
Landscapes
We can break down our ecosystems into combinations of landforms and vegetation
Landforms are the ways land, water, and climate manifest, and the multitude of ways they interact with each other
Vegetation describes the different formations and spacing of plant communities, including the dominance or absence of certain species
By applying the same vegetation to different landforms, we get ecosystems like wooded swamps or boreal forests. When we further combine landforms, vegetation, and disturbance patterns, we compose biophysical settings. These are tremendously useful categories.
Jersey is mostly composed of 6 Biophysical Settings
Accessing
(Note - we don’t think the government website is accessible to screen readers. We are happy to retrieve the data on your behalf if you cannot access the website)
To view your local biophysical data, do the following:
1) Visit landfire.gov, then click the 'get data' button and enter the map viewer
2 ) Get your biophysical setting + map zone
3 ) Go to landfirereview.org, click on 'Locate BpS', plug in your biophysical setting, and download the data for your map zone
Understanding
Biophysical settings can extend across political boundaries and plant hardiness zones. This can be confusing to gardeners and land stewards.
Major differences from the current landscape and the biophysical setting often indicate that a stewardship action (such as fire) is missing, or improper disturbance is occurring (like invasive species). Sometimes our biophysical settings really look nothing like our landscape.
This is because the biophysical settings describe the landscape prior to European colonization.
Colonization has changed minds just as much as its changed landscapes. We may see an abandoned grassland, and think it's a beautiful forest. A shopping mall may be built on ancient marshes, in areas we think are prairies.
These changes have resulted in decreased biodiversity and stability
Applying
By learning our biophysical setting, we can apply appropriate stewardship actions to improve habitats. This can include sometimes controversial steps such as cutting down sections of healthy forest to restore canopy openings. By responding to our settings rather than our knee-jerk reactions, we can begin to re-connect ourselves to the landscape
It can feel overwhelming to steward highly developed or degraded areas. We often feel that all is lost, or humans are forces of destruction. Instead we could consider how much creativity we can apply to degraded areas. They can become one of many potential habitats in the biophysical setting.