Postcards from the Future

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Limiting Factors meet Urban Sprawl

Blog Post #2 

Urban sprawl and unorganized city development have a very heavy and long-lasting effect on environmental limiting factors. The main limiting factors that are affected by unstructured urban growth are land and water. Human activity draws on the water supply and pollutes it with human waste and runoff. Land is not utilized in a manner that would offset any human activity, even by a low margin. 

Instead of planting an array of plants to nourish soil or trees to provide shade house are surrounded by lawns. These lawns require large amounts of water to keep them looking aesthetically pleasing. They serve no practical purpose, and often times require pesticides to prevent weeds. These chemicals seep into the ground as well as the local water supply via runoff, and essentially poison the surrounding landscape. 

Keystone species are driven out of areas due to habitat loss, and as a whole an area is stripped of its richness of plants, insects, and birds. From the start the carrying capacity of an area is overdrawn by scattered human presence. A herd, flock, or any other grouping of non-human tertiary life is removed and instead only small groups of previous inhabitants are chanced or sighted. 

Water usage in urban sprawl developments is very high and directly affects the main water source. The carrying capacity of the local water is exceeded as the need for residential and commercial demands tap in. 

The space of an area is a bottom-up limiting factor that is often taken for granted by humans. Innovation such as food shipping allows an artificial fix to the issue of exceeded local agricultural land use. Urban sprawl populations are grown without the need to think about allocating land use to feed a given population since food can be shipped in from all over the world.  This allows for an increasingly reckless manner of development and a detached view of the environment for citizens. 

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The Ecological Impacts of Poor Urban Planning and Urban Sprawl

Blog Post #1

The need for sustainable infrastructure in our growing societies is an important issue of our time. In North America a pressing matter in regards to building and planning urban living spaces is poor urban planning and rampant urban sprawl.

Along with negative effects on the psyche, health, and mental well-being of the people who inhabit these poorly designed spaces there is also ecological and environment devastation as a direct result of such practices. 

Urban planning is the act of planning the structure of a city which includes its policies, infrastructure, neighbourhoods, building codes, and regulations.

Urban sprawl is the uncontrolled expansion of urban areas.  The Oxford Dictionary gives the detailed definition of urban sprawl as “the disorganized and unattractive expansion of an urban or industrial area into the adjoining countryside.”

It can be logically assumed given these definitions that urban sprawl is a direct result of poor or failed urban planning seeing as good city planning makes for intelligently designed and cohesive living spaces that do not unnecessarily encroach upon the surrounding landscapes. 

To begin, urban sprawl affects the areas it directly encroaches upon. It overtakes forests, wooded meadows, farmland, and prairies that surround an existing city. Old growth forests, fields, and meadows are habitats with thriving ecosystems. These areas are disrupted for development, and as a result the habitants such as insects, birds, and animals are forced to relocated and plants and trees are cleared. Nearby water sources are polluted by runoff from construction sites and expanded human presence. 

 Statistically Speaking 

According to the Sierra Club more than one million acres of parks, farms, and open spaces are lost to urban sprawl in the United States each year. 

In Canada according to a Statistics Canada study urban uses and needs have eaten away more than 7,400 square kilometers of dependable farmland in the past few decades. This is particularly troubling considering that Canada has a very small amount of land that is suitable for food production. Every year there appear to be new development projects that are questionably approved that continue the assault on wildlife habitats for short-term profits. 

A recent and local example of this lack of consideration towards habitat preservation is the South Cameron woodlot in Windsor, Ontario that was stripped of its “significant wetland” designation opening it up to urban development by the city’s mayor, Drew Dilkens. 

Dilkens personally lobbied Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford, to fast-track the destruction of a pristine wildlife habitat and greenspace for luxury residential units that will only consume resources and release carbon emissions. 

Windsor is a municipality that only has 8 percent tree cover and a municipal city plan that prioritizes the need for more green space. There is no logic in opening up a green space that has been untouched by urbanization in an urban zone and losing the precious and inimitable benefits that space provides. 

Unfortunately this is a scenario that plays out numerous times all over the North American continent year after year, unnecessarily eating away at wildlife habitats and greenspaces.

Who is Affected and Effects Over Time

The main ecological effects of urban sprawl are air pollution, water pollution, unsustainable water consumption, and loss of greenspace and wildlife habitats. The ecological impact of sprawl is devastating and impacts humans as well as the animals that dwell in the once pristine areas. 

Sprawl is directly responsible for increased uses of personal vehicles and makes it difficult to get around a city efficiently. This created dependence on vehicles, directly contributes to air pollution, traffic fatalities of both people and animals, as well as poorer human health due to lack of physical mobility. Sprawl shapes life as moving from box to box to box. One’s home is in a box, one’s method of transportation is a box, and one’s destinations are boxes. This removed manner of living allows for citizens to turn a blind eye when city planners and developers begin destruction of yet another plot of land to expand the ever growing and cheap builds.

Over time what was once a city may become a conglomerate of suburbs with no natural reprieve or cohesive and pleasurable way of living, much like the Greater Toronto Area. With more humans there is more waste, and a greater need for landfills. Instead of containing the waste in a dense city and controlling the distribution of waste-producing products and materials sprawl allows for more space to consume and produce waste. 

Since everything is connected it is only a matter of time before urban sprawl consumes a natural area once thought to be safe. With the passing years as more and more unchecked and poorly regulated development is approved more and more animals lose their habitats, more bodies of water are polluted and/or depleted faster than they can replenish, and the more the air quality decreases due to massive car use. 

  Sources:

https://vault.sierraclub.org/sprawl/factsheet.asp

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/jul/12/urban-sprawl-how-cities-grow-change-sustainability-urban-age

https://www.britannica.com/explore/savingearth/urban-sprawl

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/2013/02/21/urban_sprawl_is_destroying_ontarios_farmland.html#:~:text=According%20to%20a%20study%20by,what%20once%20was%20mostly%20farmland.&text=At%20the%20same%20time%2C%20urban,size%20of%20Prince%20Edward%20Island.

(https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-biodiversity-doesnt-stop-at-the-city-limits-and-conservation-needs/)

https://www.everythingconnects.org/urban-sprawl.html

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Image by Jeskia Reimer via https://www.gi.alaska.edu/alaska-science-forum/little-brown-bats-remain-northern-mystery

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Protecting a Species - Little Brown Bat

1. Effect on food chain

The little brown bat is a secondary trophic consumer in their habitats, mainly consuming insects and spiders.  If the little brown bat population were to decrease the ecosystem would be off-balance with a large swell in the surviving insect population that would otherwise be controlled by the bats. This could lead to increases in the mosquito population due to the lack of natural mosquito predators. Mosquitos are problematic due to the nuisance caused by their blood feeding as well as the possibility of spreading diseases. 

The lack of insect predators could also have a negative effect on the surrounding farming industry. Without bats to eliminate large amounts of pests crops would be more susceptible to insect consumption. This could lead to farmers being more dependent on pesticides, thus opening up the environment to toxic chemical runoff, or to crop loss.

Without bats in the ecosystem other species would feel the strain. Owls depend on bats as a staple of their diets and without them a crucial piece of the local food web would be missing. This could lead to a decrease in the owl population, or it could lead to owls preying more heavily on another source of prey that causes a drastic drop in the population of said prey. Losing a crucial member of the ecosystem would lead to an imbalance that would affect the entirety of the environment.

2. Habitat

3 ways humans could be affecting the bats’ habitats:

a) Pesticides harm bats by poisoning, eliminating, or reducing the insects they depend on for sustenance. According to the Canadian Wildlife Federation bats can be killed when farms are sprayed in the early evenings when bats begin their hunting.  Heavy-duty chemicals from farms can also find their way into water runoff and pollute nearby water sources which bats require for hydration.

b) Encroachment of shorelines and other habitats is another way humans affect the habitats of bats. Bats nest on shorelines and in large trees including dead and dying ones. They are reliant on the plants found on shorelines and forests to attract insects. When humans clear shorelines or trees they are destroying bat nesting spaces as well as sources of food. 

c) Wind turbines have become an increasing factor in recent years.  Like birds many bats fall victim to wind turbines every year. When erecting a turbine the migratory paths of birds and bats is important to take into account. Wind turbines can also change behaviour in bats as well as birds as they have to take the threat into account and navigate alternative paths through what was once a familiar environment. 

The most gruesome effect wind turbines can have on bats is causing barotrauma which occurs when a bat flies too close to a turbine. Barotrauma occurs when a change in air pressure damages body tissue. The moving blades of the turbines cause nearby air pressure to drop, and any bat flying close by can suffer lung damage as a result. 

3. Protection and Breeding

a) Endangered species can be protected, allowed, and encouraged to reproduce through habitat protection. Another method to achieve this is through human interference such as modifying habitats to remediate deteriorating conditions or providing artificial environments to stabilize or preserve a population. 

b) In the case of the little brown bat preserving habitats and optimizing hibernation conditions is a better method to protect the population. This reasoning expands to preserving not only the little brown bat’s survival in its ecosystem, but all the cohabitants of said environment. As humans we are already unwisely and hastily infringing on the surrounding environment with each passing year. By protecting the entire landscape that these creatures utilize the need to breed through human intervention could be avoided. There are many reasons for maintaining natural reproduction and sovereignty in a species. The outcome of human intervention often has unforeseen and unaccounted for consequences that could drastically affect an ecosystem. While the chance is still there habitat preservation is the best option to securing the protection and growth of the little brown bat population.

4. Controlling white-nose syndrome.

The measures taken to combat white-nose syndrome such as spraying caves with fungicide or installing heaters to thwart the fungus that grows in cold conditions do not seem ecologically sustainable. 

During hibernation in the winter the body temperature of bats drops around to that of the outside. Waking up during hibernation could be fatal to bats as their energy expenditure upon awakening uses up their stored food reserves. 

Since hibernation is not static, there is an arousal state in hibernation in which bats warm up and bring their body temperatures back to a normal level. Introducing heating lamps to kill fungus that grows in cooler temperatures could have the unintended repercussion of bats entering a state of arousal too early into their hibernation or having too high a hibernating temperature to begin with since they match their body temperature to that of the outside. If the outside is warmer than the evolutionary winter cold the bat is used to relying on that could be problematic in terms of reaching an adequate state of hibernation. Temperature is of the utmost importance during hibernation and torpor for all animals as it is vital that food storage is preserved to last the entire hibernation period.

Spraying caves with fungicides has also proven to be ineffective due to how sensitive bats are to chemicals. According to Emma Hiolski in the article “Battling a Deadly Bat Fungus” harsh chemicals and repeated interference can stress bats during what is already a difficult time.  The scents from fungicides can cause bats to awaken, which as previously touched upon, can be fatal. Even a modified approach using treatment-containing vapour was enough to be disturbing to bats. 

Sources:

wind turbines and barotrauma - https://letstalkscience.ca/educational-resources/stem-in-context/how-do-wind-farms-affect-birds-and-bats

https://cwf-fcf.org/en/resources/encyclopedias/fauna/mammals/little-brown-bat.html

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3380050/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5879480/