Ecological Planning Method - Design with the Desert: Conservation and Sustainable Development - page 236

regional drainage-basin level provides insight into how the landscape functions at the
more specific local scale.
Drainage basins and watersheds, however, are seldom practical boundaries for American
planners. Political boundaries frequently do not neatly conform with river catchments, and
planners commonly work for political entities. There are certainly many examples of plans
that are based on drainage basins, such as water quality and erosion control plans. Several
federal agencies, such as the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and the U.S. Natural Resources
Conservation Service (NRCS, formerly known as the Soil Conservation Service or SCS),
regularly use watersheds as a planning unit. Planners who work for cities or counties are
less likely to be hydrologically bound.
13.2.4 Step 4: Landscape Analysis, Local Level
During step 4, processes taking place in the more specific planning area are studied. The
major aim of local-level analysis is to obtain insight about the natural processes and the
human plans and activities. Such processes can be viewed as the elements of a system,
with the landscape a visual expression of the system.
This step in the ecological planning process, like the previous one, involves the collection of
information concerning the appropriate physical, biological, and social elements that consti-
tute the planning area. Since cost and time are important factors in many planning processes,
existing published and mapped information is the easiest and fastest to gather. If budget and
time allow, then the inventory and analysis step may be best accomplished by an interdisci-
plinary team collecting new information. In either case, this step is an interdisciplinary col-
lection effort that involves search, accumulation, field checking, and mapping of data.
Ian McHarg and his colleagues developed a layer-cake model (Figure 13.2) that provides
a central group of biophysical elements for the inventory, what the ancient Greeks called the
“chorography” of the place. Categories include the earth, the surface terrain, groundwater,
surface water, soils, climate, vegetation, wildlife, and people (Table 13.1). UNESCO, in
its Man and the Biosphere Programme, has developed a more exhaustive list of possible
inventory elements (Table 13.2).
Land classification systems are valuable at this stage for analysis because they may allow
the planner to aggregate specific information into general groupings. Such systems are
based on inventoried data and on needs for analysis. Many government agencies in the
United States and elsewhere have developed land classification systems that are helpful.
The NRCS, USFS, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)
are agencies that have been notably active in land classification systems. However, there is
not a consistency of data sources even in the United States. In urban areas, a planner may
be overwhelmed with data for inventory and analysis. In remote rural areas, on the other
hand, even a NRCS soil survey may not exist or it may be old and unusable. An even larger
problem is that there is little or no consistency in scale or in the terminology used among
agencies. A recommendation of the National Agricultural Lands Study* was that a statisti-
cal protocol for federal agencies concerning land resource information be developed and
led by the Office of Federal Statistical Policy and Standards. One helpful system that has
been developed for land classification is the USGS Land Use and Land Cover Classification
System (Table 13.3).
The ability of the landscape planner and ecosystem manager to inventory biophysi-
cal processes may be uneven, but it is far better than their capability to assess human
* National Agricultural Lands Study Final Report, 1981.