Estimating food production in an urban landscape

Abstract

There is increasing interest in urban food production for reasons of food security, environmental sustainability, social and health benefits. In developed nations urban food growing is largely informal and localised, in gardens, allotments and public spaces, but we know little about the magnitude of this production. Here we couple own-grown crop yield data with garden and allotment areal surveys and urban fruit tree occurrence to provide one of the first estimates for current and potential food production in a UK urban setting. Current production is estimated to be sufficient to supply the urban population with fruit and vegetables for about 30 days per year, while the most optimistic model results suggest that existing land cultivated for food could supply over half of the annual demand. Our findings provide a baseline for current production whilst highlighting the potential for change under the scaling up of cultivation on existing land.

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Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Grafius, D.R. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6833-4993 Edmondson, J.L. Norton, B.A. Clark, R. Mears, M. Leake, J.R. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8364-7616 Corstanje, R. Harris, J.A. Warren, P.H. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0550-0886
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© 2020 The Authors. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Dates:	Accepted: 5 March 2020 Published: 20 March 2020
Institution:	The University of Sheffield
Academic Units:	The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > School of Biosciences (Sheffield) > Department of Animal and Plant Sciences (Sheffield)
Funding Information:	Funder Grant number ENGINEERING AND PHYSICAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL EP/N030095/1 ENGINEERING AND PHYSICAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL EP/I002154/1 NATURAL ENVIRONMENT RESEARCH COUNCIL UNSPECIFIED
Depositing User:	Symplectic Sheffield
Date Deposited:	28 Apr 2020 11:05
Last Modified:	28 Apr 2020 11:05
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Refereed:	Yes
Identification Number:	10.1038/s41598-020-62126-4
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:159943

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Estimating food production in an urban landscape

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