System Boundaries P .2 Designing an ecosystem is not an easy task. One of the largest challenges is handling the volume of information: each plant and animal has different preferences for temperature, sunlight, humidity, and countless other factors. Some of these plants and animals go well together, others do not. Our primary goal was to create a logical and replicable process for filtering this information rather than designing a “perfect polyculture” right away. The first phase of our ecosystem design process was to assemble a library of crops and livestock that could potentially be included as part of the system. We wanted to cast our net as broadly as possible, so we did not initially exclude elements that might seem unintuitive as greenhouse crops (for example, trees or grains), nor did we focus on one particular climatic zone. We considered three different climatic options for our system: temperate, Mediterranean, and subtropical / tropical. Within these climatic zones, we assembled a broad list of food-producing plant types ranging from vines to trees to herbs. Beyond plants, we assembled lists of fungi, livestock (chickens, rabbits), aquaculture (fish, shellfish, aquatic plants), and mircro-livestock (bees, worms, and other beneficial insects) that could all play a beneficial role in the system. In a final category, we considered non-food crops, such as wood, oil, fiber, crops for medicinal use, and plants that are not primary crops in themselves, but rather are useful as companions for primary crops. For practical considerations, rather than assembling a comprehensive list of these secondary crops, we focused mostly on selecting a few that seemed qualitatively interesting. Polydome: High Performance Polyculture Systems 55 Pagina 54
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