Working with Nature: Ecological Systems, Ecosystem 'Services', NbS

Living Systems

• Challenges of anthropocene

  • climate change

  • biodiversity loss

  • urbanisation

  • water and air quality

  • human wellbeing

• Usual idea of human over nature where we take, make, use, discard without thinking of consequences

  • materials and environment are finite

• Regenerative understanding think about restoration, re-use → take, make, change

  • design with ecological process rather thank lock them in place eg stream into a pipe

• Recirpocity → mutual exchange in relationship

Ecological concepts

• Ecosystems (smallest to largest)

  • organism

  • population→ same species in same area at the same time

  • species

  • community → population of different species living and interacting i nsame area

• ecosystem → Interaction between community (living/biotic) and the non-living/abiotic parts of the environment

• biome

• biosphere

• Biodiversity

• Ecological Relationships

• Ecological Resilience

• Landscape connectivity

Eco System

• Produces (plants/produce food), Consumers (biotic elements that consume materials), Decomposers (break down material)

  • shows exchange o fnutrients and organic molecules

  • Climatic conditions interact (rain, erosion)

Bio Diversity

• Diversity of genetic material within a species

• Diversity of multiple species with strong populations

• Ecosystem diversity

Ecological Relationships

• between biotic components

• Competition - when 2 or more organisms compete for limited resources

• Symbiosis - a close ecological relationship between 2 or more dissimilar organisms

• Predation - when 1 organism eats another for energy

• Parasitism - when 1 organism benefits and harms the host organism

• Mutualism - when both species in the interaction benefit from it

• Commensalism - when 1 species benefits while the other (host) is unaffected or unharmed

Keystone species

• have huge impat on eco-system, balance and structure of eco-system

• shape and influence of biodiversity

• Keystone species have a disproportionately large impact

  on its ecosystem relative to its abundance, playing a critical

  role in maintaining the structure and balance, regulating

  food chains, shaping habitats and supporting biodiversity,

  to ensure the long-term health and resilience of the

  environment

Succession

• Pioneer Stages

  • Lichens are algae and fungus that live together and break down the rock

• Intermediate stages

  • seeds

  • fruits

• Climax Communtiy

  • long stand forests (kauri)

• Primary and Secondary succession where primary starts an ecosystem while secondary continues/sustains it

Ecological Resilience

• Ecological resilience is an ecosystem's capacity to absorb disturbances, adapt, and reorganize while maintaining its core functions and structure.

Tipping Points

• Certain point where something will be underwater so its a transition point and so can’t go back to what it was (eg ocean to desert)

• force applied, tipping point reached, transition happens with unkown consequences on environment

Disturbance

• Natural, seasonal, human

• some species need fire to heal and germinate

• sometmes species require distrubances are needed to reset

• adaptation to these disturbances

Adaptation and Recovery

• understanding how you act can shift timelines, speed up slow down, set up ecosystems to support that process

Landscape connecivity

• we build cities great for people but not as much to create ecological corridoors to maintain biodiversity and ecological resilience and so ecosystems cna adapt and thrive after development

  • patch dynamics → patches of ecologically diverse ecosystems depending on the type of ecosystem, corridoors that link multiple patches to create “stepping stones“ so species can move between them and maintain population diversity

  • patch needs a buffer zone outside the patch to protect it

Ecosystem Services

• Ecosystem services are the essential, life-supporting benefits we/humans receive from healthy ecosystems.

  

• understanding natural systems in a way that we’ve never understood into a system that we can understand eg finance

• analyse potential and exisitng systems

• what provisions is possible within cities for ecosystems and what would be difficult to provide

  • how buildings and cities contirbute to some services that others

• Existing design mehods to contribute to an ecosystem srrvice to provide positive environmental outcomes

• 
  

  

  
  

• Increased vegetation and ecosystem health benefits

  • Temperature regulation hard to regulate (eg europe and australia atm)

  • plants produce smog which improves air quality

  • real estate value increases around green areas

  • vegetation in ground reduces flooding risk absorbs the water and reduce water run off

• understand value of a recognition of value to others (relational value)

Urban biodiversity is a built enrionment design issue?

• we design for value for money

• we don’t support ecosystem functionality

• city usually made from original rich ecosystem that provided resources for their environment

  • we built ontop of them and now need to import resources from other places

• biodiversity loss through → land use change, climate change, biotic exchange,

  • degradation of urban areas, human health, and wellbeing as a result of this

• we can reduce biodiversity loss

  • increase connectivity between ecosystems, promote biodiversity, revegetation, remediation of eco systems, conservation of remnant ecosystems.

Nature based Solutions

• “Actions to protect, sustainably manage, and restore natural or modified ecosystems that address societal challenges effectively and adaptively, simultaneously benefiting people and nature”

• NbS should:

  → restore ecological function

  → support biodiversity

  → address climate adaptation

  → improve community wellbeing

  → provide multiple co-benefits

• Designing for Multiple Benefits where one intervention can achieve:

  → biodiversity

  → recreation

  → stormwater management

  → cultural revitalisation

  → climate adaptation

• Ecosystem based adaptation I

• Ecosystem based managemnt

• Urban green and blue infrastructure

• Ecological restoration (human actions into ecosystems)

• Ecological engineering

• Biomimicry (mimicking the ecosystem in the building or a system)

• Biophyllic design

They benefit people and ecosystems together whereas other solutions may help people but actively degrade natural environment.

(Pipes, sea walls)

co-benefits increasing resilient to climate change, increased provision of ecosystem services, increased human wellbeing (not nature but grounded in western hemisphere relationship with nature).

• working with nature (soft decision) rather than replacing natural systems (hard decision)

• Interventions in different scales (island/city, watershed ridge to reef, settlement, urban/neighbourhood, site

• Healthier ecosystems → increased eco system services → more resilient communities

Forests

• inner forests more in the inner city noise and pollution reduction health and wellbeing

• Nearby forests transitional and human interactive services water purification reducing soil erosion providing relational contexts with forests

• faraway forests where biodiversity is strongest carbon sequestration timber resourcing, contributes to wider landscape

  
  

Riparian Zones

• Habitat benefits for native species

• Reduces flooding

• Protects soil

• Water Remediation

• Help process things (sewage waste,

• Living sea walls (living crib walls) where trees planted in supported sea wall network to create stabilisation of banks and edges

Wetlands

• Powerful ecosystems can be water based or saltwater systems

• food production

• Urban managed where mimicry of wetlands develop overtime and settle into a system

Coast and Shores

• Shading, and freshwater

• Restore mangrove habitats

• Prevents houses from washing away

• Houses on sand dunes they have risks of tsunami etc, dunes need to be well planted to be stable and no sand to travel through wind to houses from wind

Reefs

• small electrical currents attracts corals and speed up the way they grow so coral seeding and artificial reef building good for building ecosystems in face of rising seas

• Fish aggregation devices that attracts fish to it

Urban Areas

• Vertical systems to create habitats above 2nd floor not likely for birds, rooftop gardens for taller building will mainly be for humans not animals

• Constructed canal systems to replicate traditional stream edges and mitigate existing challenges in urban environments

• Instead of pipes using rain gardens to slow that water

• Green belts provide ecosystem corridors for species in urban environments

• Sponge cities help mitigate flood and temperature challenges

Moving towards biodiverse regenerative ecological urbanism

• Kia uta ki tai mountain to sea

• Ridge to reef connected sociological systems

• The systems nature based solutions might do from ridge to reef (slides paste here)

• Being grounded in place having understanding of water and land and ethical responsibility for guardianship for our landscapes and environments

• Solve and positively contribute environmental issues and reduce degradation caused by urbanisation

• Requires best available science partnered with local communities (idea of equity)

NUWAO

• NUWAO (nature based solutions in Oceanic context) pacific needs to say what it feels like here not European.

Systems

• Systems are all around us and today we talked a lot about ecosystems and just thinking about the parts of a system. All of them usually have the same building blocks, elements, interconnections, and purpose. And one example could be a tree and how it has its elements, interconnections, and purpose.

• A reminder to look at week ones, slides, many examples of systems, diagrams, all the ways you can represent information in your assignments. So when you look at water systems, what are the elements, what are the interconnections? What is the purpose of that? Energy systems, the same things? You might have your advices to capture your solar panels. Perhaps, you have your batteries. What are the connections between those different elements? And always think about, you know, how these are integrated into the architecture, how is this integrated into the design and the building? you do a lot of systems diagrams in assignment one and also in assignment 2.

Certifications

• Overview of certifications because next week we'll have the guest lecture about living building challenge and we'll learn everything in more detail about living building challenge. And I just wanted to do a little recap for you to know, you know, where does the living building challenge such in relationship to other certifications that we talked about? last semester, we talked a lot about passive design, and a lot of that, those concepts are linked with another certification, which is passive haus, which comes from Germany. And so that's one type of certification for building. We also talked a bit about Homestar, Green Star, some of your case studies last semester might have been certified to those schemes. So those are the New Zealand Green Building Council, too, source certifications. So those are more your local kind of certifications. And all of those are things that help you go beyond the minimum, beyond the building code, so they help us guide and they help us actually check that you are doing, you know, the things, you're really going beyond and doing more, in terms of your sustainability and potentially your regenerative design. So those tools help us to verify, performance of buildings, etcetera. This semester we are talking about living building challenge, which is, another international standard, developed by Living Future Institute and they also had another 2 which is currently not in use, but it might be interesting for you to look at for your, in terms of your master planning and side planning, which is called living community challenge. So this is going beyond the building. So just out of curiosity, you might want to have a look at this. They have variety levels of you know, your performance or sustainability or, you know, to the top tourists, regenerative design.

• There are also some other ones overseas that I added here, not so common in New Zealand, but just to give you a sense of where we are and why we are looking at the living building challenge. So, I would say that this goes really beyond the other ones. Some of the tools are just helping us to do a little bit better than what we are doing at the moment. helping the industry to move to more greener and kind of environments, but the living building challenge is the one that actually goes further and pushes designers to do more. And the other big difference is that for the living building challenge, the building has to be used and operated for one year to prove that you actually am getting those results. So a lot of the issues with some other certifications were that,, I would say, like, especially some of those, like Leeds, overseas, you were saying that, you know, the design was very good, but actually in practice, things were not working as expected. And, just a bit of a critical view that, we have to be, we have to do our research and be critical with certifications, and here's just one extreme example where, this IKEA store had achieved the highest bream UK sustainability rating. But it was built, and they demolished the, big supermarket. So which was the most sustainable supermarket. So what do you think about this? green, sustainable solution, like removing everything, demolishing everything. that was quite new and then replacing it with a green building. So obviously they were not thinking about materials and carbon back then now certifications keep improving, but this is just one little story to remind you to be critical about all of them,

• We chose the living building challenge because usually, it is much better than the other ones and ensures the real performance and real, and it's really comprehensive and holistic as well. And a reminder about the petals and you're focussing on water and energy, plus another petal of your choice.