An increasing number of people in the United States are finding it difficult to access a safe, personally acceptable, nutritious diet. Urban agriculture is seen as an important avenue for increasing their food security. For better or worse, urban agriculture is subject to the urban setting, agriculture must complete with other socially and economically viable land uses. Establishing and maintaining a robust system of urban agriculture will require a constant seeking out of urban open spaces that, at least for a time, are available for food production. This study focuses on golf courses as one such type of open space. Due to market saturation, a fairly significant number of golf courses are presently experiencing financial difficulty. Tone potential an emerging land use type catagor that is experiencing is increasing. Developing a robust and reliable system of urban agriculture is one strategy for improving food security. In the urban setting, agriculture must complete with other socially and economically viable land uses. Consequently, much of the research completed to date focuses on using abandoned lots as food growing sites. Fewer studies seek to identify the broad range of urban open spaces that might eventually contribute to a system of urban agriculture that is economically and socially viable. This thesis focuses on a newly emerging class of abandoned urban lands – golf courses. Countryside Golf Course located in Roanoke, Virginia is the case study site that is deeply investigate for its potentional of contributing to food security. / Master of Landscape Architecture

The organization of complex societies requires constant information to flow between individuals. Because of their elaborated social structures and principally because of the division of labor, social insects depend on the efficacy of their information web in order to adapt the colony activity to its needs. Although many studies focused on understanding the regulation of the foraging activity, little is known about the intranidal food distribution and stock management regulation. The aim of this thesis is to quantify and describe the dynamics of the food flow and its regulation in an ant colony. A medical imagery technique, scintigraphy, was adapted to follow the propagation of radio-labeled nutrients inside the nest. This technique allowed spatiotemporal dynamics quantification of the food flow and led to the enunciation of simple yet robust regulation rules that are at work during the colony feeding process.<p>The dynamics of the harvest is regulated by the coupling of a positive and negative feedbacks. The harvest acts as both: negative and positive feedbacks. Entering food-loads trigger foragers to exploit the newly discovered food source through the well-known recruitment process. At the same time, the harvest proportionally reduces the entering food flow until the complete stop of the foraging activity when the colony reaches satiety. Surprisingly, the positive feedback (that is the recruitment) is not responsible for a faster entering food flow and is not influenced by the colony needs while the exploring activity is. The spatial dynamics of the food exchange network revealed stable patterns and fine tuning regulation of the feeding process. Spatial analysis of the food distribution showed that sucrose is heterogeneously stored among individuals and also heterogeneously consumed. We observed a regular spatial structure leading to centralization of the stocks: heavy loaded individuals being at the center of the cluster and weakly loaded individuals at its periphery.<p>The spatiotemporal quantification of the food flow allowed describing and understanding the flexibility of the colony to adapt its working force according to its nutritional requirements.<p> / Doctorat en Sciences / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished