SEDA Land – curvedflatlands

Store and flux – it’s a game

Ecosystem stores and fluxes. Local-scale exchanges of energy and matter. Human as well as Biophysical stores. The threat of the big global flux. The basis of a computer game.

SEDA Land [1] – a part of the Scottish Ecological Design Association (SEDA) – has been working with students at the University of Abertay Dundee [2] on a computer game in which- after catastrophic events – communities are striving for survival.

Figure 1. The Ring of Brodgar, Orkney, built by early settlers who tilled the soil and grazed pasture, opening the way to today’s agriculture. Soils and essential biodiversity are degrading here, but it’s not the dust bowl yet. Images by Squire, inset shows a record (LP) cover – Dust Bowl Ballads by Woody Guthrie (more below).

In the game, the communities have to provide a minimum of three things from the land – food, shelter and power. They have to grow crops, grass and livestock, make houses and barns from rock and trees, and generate power from turbines and other sources.

Land is in short supply. The communities have to work together or they fail. But there’s something else – a recent cataclysm opened portals to the other side. Standing stones, some with obscure icons carved into them, appeared in the landscape. The ‘veil’ thinned and fantastical creatures passed through, some to help the communities, some to cause mayhem. How will they cope!

Well the first thing (GS said) is to understand ecosystem stores and fluxes [3], first the real, then maybe the metaphysical. Here we look at stores and fluxes at two scales. But first a quick look at another portal, described in a work of poetry by Dante and portrayed by the artist William Blake [4].

From William Blake‘s illustrations of Dante‘s Divine Comedy, Inferno III [4] as Dante and Virgil are about to step through Hell-Gate (from one world to another), where they come across the tortured souls of the INDIFFERENT (those who did nothing?).

Figure 2. At Hell-Gate, between one world of soft leafy trees and another where souls move forever along rising paths through red and blue shards (fire and ice – climatic cycles?). Image taken by GS at the Blake Exhibition, Tate Modern, London, January 2020 [4].

Store and flux at local scales

All ecosystems are subject to large environmental ‘fluxes’ that are essential for life, but that can destroy life if not regulated. Most land-based ecosystems build a ‘store’, which consists of soil, plants, microbes, invertebrates, higher animals, and the ‘dead’ organic matter produced when these organisms shed tissue or die. The organic matter is ‘worked’ by the living things into forms that bind soil particles and hold water and the nutrients essential for life.

The main inward fluxes (Fig. 3) are of solar radiation, water, and in some cases deposition of dust, ash and chemicals carried by moving air. The store processes these fluxes to enable (for example) photosynthesis by plants in which carbon dioxide from the air is converted to plant matter, and fixation of nitrogen from the air by a symbiosis of soil microbes and roots.

Figure 3. Diagram representing ecological stores (in the box) including soil (mineral particles, dead organic matter, etc.) and living matter (plants, microorganisms, invertebrates, etc.), and fluxes of energy and matter into (black lines) and out of (orange lines) the store. Based on Squire & Hawes, 2024 [3].

The main outward fluxes (Fig. 3) are long-wave radiation from the plants and soil that have been warmed by solar energy, evaporation of water (termed transpiration when this moves through plants), gaseous emissions to the air from breakdown of organic matter, further loss of water and materials as surface runoff and drainage to bedrock, and the loss of store particles by the same forms of air movement that also deposit material.

For a system to have resilience, its stores and fluxes have to be balanced. The store must regulate the fluxes to survive. It mostly does so in a natural system. But when people came to use the land, to cut trees, grow crops, and graze animals, they added two extra fluxes: inputs such as cultivation, controlled burn, new seed, livestock, fertiliser and more recently big machines; and offtake of material for food, clothing and timber.

Over time, the inputs and offtake have become so large that they commonly lead to imbalance in the system, generally to its detriment. While managed ecosystems can in principle last for many thousands of years, they can also be destroyed in a few decades by mis-management. Imbalance in store and flux and subsequent destruction of the store for short-term gain, whether intended or through ignorance, is named extractivism. The US Dust Bowl is a classic example (Fig. 4).

From the Dust Pneumonee song by Woody Guthrie

I went to the doctor and the doctor said my son (repeat), You got that Dust Pneumonee and you aint got long, not long.

My good gal sings the Dust Pneumonee Blues (repeat), She loves me cos she’s got the Dust Pneumonee too.

Figure 4. Cover of the classic Woody Guthrie record of songs about the US Dust Bowl released by Folkways some decades ago. The people most affected by such environmental catastrophe are usually the poorest, the vagrant, not those who encourage the change or set the policy. The words above left are from one of the songs; those below from inside the record sleeve [5].

The pioneering ax and plough rapidly upset the interplay of natural forces that had formed and preserved rich soils ….. The same tide that rolled the frontier forward from the Atlantic rolled back nature’s stabilising mantle of trees and grasses and bared virgin soil to weathering.
John Asch

But something is missing from Fig. 3 – the knowledge and experience that people have in managing land is also part of the store …. and no matter how good the management, the store can be affected by distant forces.

The store of knowledge, continuity and community

The diagram in Fig. 3 therefore represents only one part of a managed ecosystem. The other part of the store is held by the People that live and work on the land (Fig. 5). The People not only give to and take from the biophysical store but they form an additional store in terms of their knowledge, experience and social connections.

Figure 5. Diagram to represent an ecosystem in terms of its biophysical components and its communities of people (orange boxes), both under constant threat from large global fluxes, here divided into Biophysical and Human (blue boxes).

Probably more so that at any other time, ecosystem stores are now under threat from extractivism. Inputs and offtake have become so great that they dominate the store. This need not be, and we can learn from those examples of successful stewardship.

Yet well managed systems are under threat from things well outside their control. In talking to the Abertay students, these threats came to be called ‘Big Fluxes’ (Fig. 5).

Threat of the Big Flux

The Big Fluxes can be divided broadly into those having Biophysical and those having Human causes. The Biophysical, such as volcanic eruption, tsunami, flooding, and cycles of global cooling and warming, are outside the control or influence of any parcel of land and its people. Many of the Human causes are also outside local control – take war, blockade, nuclear fallout and the acts of occupying ideologies to force mass starvation and genocide. In some cases, the controlling hands are physically closer to the scene – take the evictions and clearances that depopulated rural Scotland in the 1700s and 1800s.

But some Biophysical forces can in principle be influenced by Human intervention, both inside and outside the land in question. For example, disease epidemics (and pandemics) may have originated well outside the land, but their spread to and within the land could have been limited, more than they have been recently, through better understanding of the infection process and more effective control.

Can anything be done to make the local stores and fluxes in Fig. 3 resilient to a Big Flux? To a degree it can, for some of the Big Fluxes. For example, if agricultural or grazing land is denuded of perennial vegetation, its soil over-cultivated or over-grazed, the organic matter allowed to degrade and the surface left exposed, it will suffer more under flood and storm than if it was properly cared for (Fig. 6). And fire-prone forest and bush can to a degree be protected by creating breaks and reducing the store’s burnable material.

Figure 6. Erosion gulleys like this form in many parts of the world, mainly when gradual soil degradation over a long period (which may be unnoticed) is scaled up to catastrophic erosion during extreme rainfall and flood. Most organic matter, including roots, in the photograph above occupies the upper 10 to 20 cm of soil (short vertical bar). Some roots, mainly of the shrubs, can penetrate the red soil layer to 0.5-1.5 m (long vertical bar). Arrows show the ends of roots exposed after the collapse of the soil into an erosion gulley 5 m deep. Photograph by Squire, south-east Asia, 2014.

Forgetting the Big Fluxes

The situation that needs to be faced, in reality and in the game, is that People forget about the Big Fluxes. There will be another, there’s no doubt, but People fail to prepare for it.

Some Big Fluxes are so infrequent that generations, sometimes centuries, even millennia, pass without experience of them. The last major tsunami to hit Scotland was thousands of years ago and the last volcano to throw its ash this way was Laki, in Iceland in 1783-84.

Others Fluxes are more frequent but governance repeatedly fails to act. In Scotland, and in the UK as a whole, home-grown food production fell well short of feeding the people in the run of bad-weather years in the late 1870s. Rather than giving long-term technological support for agriculture, the government filled the void by importing food from north America, leaving agriculture to suffer and its people to leave the land.

A few decades later, and in the face of blockades in 1914 and 1939, the country again had to rely on imports. Even now when its advanced agricultural technology could in principle feed the people, it would still fall well short in a face of blockade. Extreme climatic events elsewhere could have the same effect. Imagine that drought destroyed the vegetable harvest in Spain and north Africa. Where would the UK get its veggies from?

So ‘memory’ of the big fluxes needs to kept by people, by their communities and in their shared history.

It’s a game

How is all this going to be realised in a computer game? Well not all of it, at this point, but things like soil, vegetation, livestock, rock and power sources can be represented spatially. People have a choice as to whether they build their stores and extract materials sensibly, or let them degrade and ultimately fail.

They might be succeeding, and all looks good, but then what’s the chance of a Big Flux! Can other forces help them? It’s a work in progress.

Further information on soils, agroecological farm practice, early game plans, Pictish art, livestock and related topics discussed with the Abertay students can be found on subsequent pages of this post listed after Sources | Links.

Author | contact: For this article: geoff.squire@hutton.ac.uk or geoff.squire@outlook.com. For SEDA Land and development of the game: gail@halvorsenarchitects.co.uk. Lorna Dawson at SEFARI Scot gave ideas and information on a range of topics: lorna.dawson@hutton.ac.uk.

Sources | Links!

[1] SEDA Land: https://www.seda.uk.net/seda-land

[2] Abertay University: School of Design and Informatics

[3] Store and flux and related agri-ecosystem processes are described in a book chapter to be published ‘open access’ in August: Squire GR, Hawes C (2024). Biodiversity for Agriculture – the role of integrated farm management in supporting agriculture through biodiversity. In Managing Biodiversity in Agricultural Landscapes. Burleigh Dodds Science Publishing.

[4] William Blake (1757-1827) made many illustrations based on events in the Divine Comedy by Dante (1265-1321). Some were shown at an exhibition William Blake at Tate Modern in 2019-2020 and the complete set is now available in a book – Schutze S, Terzoli MA – William Blake – Dante’s Divine Comedy – The Complete Drawings, published by Taschen. The Divine Comedy is available in paperback and in online translations at Project Gutenberg and Digital Dante.

[5] Dust Bowl Ballads by Woody Guthrie, Folkways Records, 1964: see Smithsonian Folkways. More on the Dust Bowl at livingfield web: Dust Bowl Ballads which includes links to the pioneering work on soils by Hugh Hammond Bennett, e.g. Bennett HH, Chapline WR. 1928. Soil erosion a national menace. Circular No. 33, United States Department of Agriculture.

[6] William Blake and the Dust Bowl were both referred to in an earlier presentation and web resource viewable on the curvedflatlands web at Soil: healing the skin. The healing remedies include Bandage (e.g. coverings) and Ointment (e.g. exudates and other organic matter from grass-crop-tree mixtures). Click for a PDF file of the presentation.

Continued …..

Further background to a range of topics discusssed with Abertay students over the last few month – click on the page number links at the bottom.

Page 2 More on soil degradation under agriculture and forestry and ways to avoid it by Lorna Dawson and Geoff Squire.

Page 3 Early project ideas and descriptions offered to the Abertay students by SEDA Land and James Hutton Institute (Geoff Squire, Lorna Dawson, Gail Halvorsen and Pete Iannetta).

Page 4 Pictish art – some standard books and links to active groups and people.

Page 5 Sheep, cattle, walls and fences – including examples of ancient breeds.

Pages: 12345

Community mapping – food, climate

SEDA Land’s mapping initiatives. Communities, landowners, science, technology, computer gaming. Food sourcing and food security. Local vs global. Spatial data and the need for local knowledge. Building resilience to global disruption.

SEDA Land arose from the Scottish Ecological Design Association’s 2021 Land Conversations as an active and inclusive grouping intent on exploring and then influencing the way we value and manage land and water [1].

One of the first developments from the Land Conversations was an idea to ‘map’ the land around a place or community for its capacity to provide for the people, now and in the future. That capacity included food, water, wood, open space and a sense of place. The ideas quickly developed and by early 2022 took form through collaborations between many people and organisations in a project called Mapping Future Food and Climate Change.

A map of fields (inset) on a farmed landscape, Aberdeenshire (original photograph by GS).

Community – land – science – art – gaming

A pilot study began in 2022, based on the locality of Huntly, comprising a range of community groups, schools and local landowners [2]. Scientific institutions are providing knowledge of soil, crops, food, carbon storage, greenhouse gas emissions [3] and expertise in computer gaming [4]. The main elements of the pilot study are as follows.

The land in and surrounding the town, and its nature, shape, occupancy, community involvement and ownership.
The biophysical status of the land, its climate and weather, bedrock and soil, carbon storage, biodiversity.
Structure of the land – mapping ‘parcels’ or units of management (e.g. fields, woods) and what they produce or contribute.
The community’s use of locally-grown products versus the import of things grown on resources elsewhere.
The meaning of the land to the people, expressed through tradition, art craft, music [1].
Definition and analysis of spatial and temporal ‘layers’ (e.g. area, soil, climate, use, inputs, outputs) to understand the current value and limitations of the land and its future potential for delivering benefits such as food security, C sequestration, biodiversity and community involvement.
Expressing all of the above through computer gaming.

But where do we begin … ?

Fig. 1 Map of the Climatic Conditions in Scotland, published 1970-72 by Birse and colleagues at the Macaulay Institute for Soil Research [5].

Mapping the biophysical, economic and political landscape of Scotland has a history going back several hundred years. The climatic maps produced in the early 1970s from the Macaulay Institute for Soil Research (Fig 2) are among the most spectacular. The arable-grass agricultural land lies mostly in the red and yellow areas around the east coast and across the central belt.

In the half-century since Fig. 1, digital maps have become the norm, now available online for many features – including land classification, soil and soil carbon content, erosion and compaction risk, and land suitability for agriculture and forestry [6]. The study based around Huntly will be able to use the maps, and the data behind the maps.

Fig. 2 An area of land, a few kilometers in diameter, in which the individual parcels are identified, each having the potential for distinct and different land use [7].

Mapping land and land use

The patterning of the land is one of the first things to appreciate, and in particular the division of the land into the units of management. Why is this important? Well … suppose three fields have similar soil, slope (etc.) but one is woodland, another is grassland and the third is cropland. They all differ in what they produce, their agrochemical and mechanical inputs, the carbon they store, the biodiversity they support and what they conserve or release to the wider environment. Therefore the management of the field is just as important as its underlying qualities.

Mapping fields and other land parcels in fine detail is now possible (Fig. 2). Their shapes can be made visible and to a large degree, but not completely, the use of the land in each parcel can also be defined. Without even visiting the area, the parcels containing established vegetation such as woodland and marsh can be identified from remote sensing and each of the agricultural parcels can be separated into grassland and arable (or cropped land) using data from government census.

The sequence of crops grown in an arable field can also be defined, and from that, combined with data on soil, climate, outputs (yield, etc.) and inputs (agrochemicals, etc.), the capacity for carbon storage end emissions can be estimated or modelled.

Let’s get on with the mapping.

Fig. 3 The parcels of land in Fig. 2 supporting grass for livestock grazing (left), crops such as barley (centre) and a variety of other uses in agriculture and forestry (right) [7].

Given the right information [7], the shapes can be coloured to show the different forms of land use. In the example in Fig. 3 – based on the field patterns in Fig. 2 – the first to go in is grassland (Fig. 3 left), then tilled or arable land (centre) and third, the remaining areas consisting of woodland, vegetables and fruit, minor crops that occupy relatively few fields, and also semi-natural vegetation (right).

When all land parcels have been identified, the map looks as in Fig. 4: a complex mosaic of land use types that gives the Atlantic zone maritime its unique features. Some of the patterning originated hundreds, even thousands of years ago. Like much of lowland Scotland, and despite removal of the original vegetation, the fields are diverse in size and shape, with little evidence of prairie agriculture that continues to degrade so much once-natural land in many parts the world.

Fig. 4 The three parts of Fig. 3 brought together, where each colour represents a distinct type of land use [7].

Limits to data – the need for local knowledge

Because of the way land use has been recorded historically, the arable fields can be defined by the crops grown in them, such as barley, oats, wheat, beans, peas, oilseed rape, potato, turnips, and so on. However, grassland – which often occupies the most land in regions of lowland Scotland – tends to be lumped in just a few categories. In the current census, the two categories are grass present in a field for under 5 years and grass in its fifth year and over. This lack of definition in grassland obscures the great variation found across Scotland’s managed grass in terms of biodiversity, soil carbon content, fertiliser inputs, greenhouse gas emissions and grazing potential.

Several other factors important for the study cannot be gained from current surveys. It is not possible to know from remote sensing or census data the quality and purpose of the product and whether it is consumed locally or exported from the area. For example, a field of cereal (barley, wheat or oats) could be used for malting (alcohol), livestock feed or milling to produce flour. The cereal feed might be given to livestock on the same farm or sold to a merchant to be used in another place. Even much of the grain used for milling – though small in quantity compared to malting and feed – will be sold to merchants for distribution elsewhere.

And it’s not possible to know what the landscape means to the people who live in the area. So for these unknown or uncertain features, we must add in local knowledge ….. that provided by the general community and the people that manage the land.

Next steps

SEDA Land, the Huntly Community interests and the academic partners are now looking to obtain grant funding. In the meantime, several of those involved will be scoping the digital mapping and other background data available online and members of the mapping group (1-4] will be getting to know each other through meetings, real and virtual.

By way of introduction to the project, SEDA Land is preparing a set of questions asking people’s perceptions of what the land around Huntly provides – for example, how much food and timber is grown locally rather than imported. The questions are intended primarily for schools but will be available to any in the community.

Fig. 5 Map of a region in Scotland showing land in broad categories: the lower altitudes support arable (crops) and grass, shown in green and yellow; the higher reaches, especially to the top of the image holding mainly rough grazing. Map prepared by the James Hutton Institute as a contribution to Nourish Scotland’s work on food systems [7].

Spatial scales and land categories

One of the first things the group will consider is the spatial scales at which data will be recorded and the categories into which land is divided. An example of broad land use categories is given in Fig. 5, which represents a tract about 30 miles at its widest. This sort of mapping gives a quick guide to the general possibilities for food and timber production. Green and yellow is already under managed agriculture. Orange, which covers more than half the area, is of low productivity, mostly used for extensive grazing of sheep, but offers possibilities, for example, of woodland regeneration.

Fig. 6 An area of land, lower altitudes to the bottom-right containing many small fields (average area around 7 ha), rising in height to large units of more open moorland at the top [7].

Much finer detail can be defined, as in Fig. 2-4, giving clues as to how local topography, soil, microclimate and past management determine the patterning of fields and what can be grown in them.

The fields and other units in a tract of land a few kilometers wide are shown in Fig. 6. The area to the bottom of the image, comprising many small fields, has been in agricultural use for thousands of years, but records exist of its conversion into high-quality arable and grass from the time of the monastic improvements beginning in the 1200s. The top of the image is higher land which would have been woodland in prehistory, but now comprises large units of open moor or rough grazing. The strands of small fields running down from the moorland identify water courses. Fig. 6 is taken from the upper left of the larger area shown in Fig. 7.

The scientific contributors will assist with defining scales and data, but anyone with interest in the project can begin now with online and free-to-use mapping through the National Library of Scotland and Ordnance Survey [8].

The curvedflatlands web site will be publishing further news, posts and comment over the coming months and maintains a growing inventory of relevant data sources [9]. The SEDA Land web pages [1] will be the formal point of contact for the project.

Fig. 7 Fields and other land units delineated over a landscape bordering the sea (in white), two crop types identified by orange and yellow colour; width 47 km. From work by Nora Quesada, Graham Begg and Geoff Squire at the James Hutton Institute [7].

Sources | Links

[1] SEDA Land is part of the Scottish Ecological Design Association: https://www.seda.uk.net/seda-land. A working group within SEDA Land, including all the participants, is taking forward the work on community mapping. Primary contact for the project: Gail Halvorsen, email: gail@halvorsenarchitects.co.uk. As in the Land Conversations, writing, poetry, art, craft and music will be integral. Contact: Sophie Cooke (sophie.cooke1@open.ac.uk).

[2] Primary contact: Huntly Development Trust www.huntlydevelopmenttrust.org. Email: Jill Andrews (jill.andrews@huntly.net). Local schools and landowners are active in the project.

[3] The scientific input is guided by the James Hutton Institute and Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC). Contacts at JHI: Lorna Dawson (lorna.dawson@hutton.ac.uk) and Cathy Hawes (cathy.hawes@hutton.ac.uk). Contact at SRUC: Mads Fischer-Moller (Mads.Fischer-Moller@sruc.ac.uk).

[4] The University of Abertay, Dundee, will be working towards gaming design through a post-graduate student group starting later in 2022. Contact: Kenneth Fee (k.fee@abertay.ac.uk).

[5] E L Birse and colleagues at the Macaulay Institute for Soil Research (now part of the James Hutton Institute) produced three classic maps on the Assessment of the Climatic Conditions in Scotland. The one shown is the last of the three, credits as follows:

[6] The James Hutton Institute’s online resources: Scotland’s Soil Data and other maps accessible from that page .

[7] Data for defining land use (crops, grass, etc .) in Fig. 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 came from EU’s Integrated Administration and Control System (IACS) and was spatially analysed by Nora Quesada, Graham Begg and Geoff Squire at the James Hutton Institute. The maps in Fig. 4 and 7 were published some years ago on the Living Field web site at Scaperiae. Contact: graham.begg@hutton.ac.uk.

[8] Online map resources The National Library of Scotland has an increasing range of historical maps available online at the Map Images Homepage. The Ordnance Survey’s extensive downloadable resources are at Open Data Downloads and for education, see Free Education Resources for Teachers, and Digimap for Schools.

[9] curvedflatlands is compiling an inventory of mostly online data on land, soil, vegetation, biodiversity, climate, etc., which will be updated as new material becomes available: Sources of Information.

Author / Contact: GS has been working with SEDA to develop the 2021 Land Conversations, is on the steering group of SEDA Land and keeps (honorary) links with the James Hutton Institute. email: geoff.squire@outlook.com or geoff.squire@hutton.ac.uk

[Page online 10 March 2022, minor edits 27 March 2022]