Abstract
Urban agriculture is undergoing a contemporary global renaissance, providing fresh food for growing urban populations and vital environmental benefits for cities. Despite urban agriculture’s social-environmental importance, a rural bias in agricultural research has left critical gaps in our understanding of how urban agroecosystem management can sustainably produce food in the future. Specifically, there is a need to study urban agriculture water management due to recent drought events, likely increases in urban water scarcity, and higher temperatures. Gardeners can play a decisive role in increasing urban agriculture’s sustainability through their water, soil and vegetation management. Here, we examined water use, vegetation, and soil management in the California Central Coast - a region facing drought - to better understand how urban agriculture management affects water use sustainability. We worked with gardeners to study their water management decisions using citizen science, where volunteer gardeners collected their own water use behavior data and participated in a survey to describe their behaviors around water use, water conservation, and plot level management. We found that water use varies by gardener, and water use is positively related to mulching and crop cover in plots. Contrary to expectations, gardeners that reported high levels of concern over current environmental conditions (drought) and water conservation in the survey tended to use high amounts of water, suggesting that environmental worldviews do not necessarily translate into everyday practices. On the other hand, gardeners in gardens with more rules and regulations around water use tended to use less water, highlighting the practicality of enforcing rules and regulations during drought periods. Gardeners reported interest in adapting gardening practices to more sustainably use water regardless of their current practices. The combination of education and rules and regulations will help improve the sustainability of garden systems in times of environmental change.
Highlights
More than half of the world’s population lives in cities (United Nations Department of Economic Social Affairs PD., 2015), and urban agriculture is a resource to enhance urban food system sustainability (Wiskerke, 2015)
How can urban gardeners adapt their agroecological practices to improve the sustainability of resource use in changing climates and during times of resource stress? In this study in four community gardens, we show gardeners variably use water across environmental concerns and crop regimes, and that these gardeners differ in their perception of their water use
We investigated the biophysical and social variables that affect water use in urban gardens, what gardeners learn from water research participation, and how gardeners adapt their management to be more sustainable
Summary
Urban gardeners may lack appropriate agroecological knowledge of practices to promote sustainable resource management of plants, soils, and water (Gregory et al, 2015) This is important because plants in agroecosystems are carefully maintained through soil nutrient management and water supplementation based on plant ecophysiology and environmental conditions (Prasad et al, 2008; Daryanto et al, 2017), but current and future patterns of extreme drought and heat in cities are increasing the need for natural resource inputs while simultaneously reducing access to them (Milly et al, 2008; Hunt et al, 2013). This could limit the sustainability of urban agriculture due to negative effects of drought on crop production (Tardieu et al, 2000) and for natural resource conservation in cities (Eriksen-Hamel and Danso, 2010)
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