Sectors are the areas and elements of the property that are influenced and affected by external factors such as sun, wind, rain, water flow, freezes, noise, pollution, etc.
As part of your analysis, you want to mark where these elements enter or influence the property, so you can include this factor in your design. It isn’t enough to look at elements on your site only. What is coming in from outside your property boundaries and how will these factors affect your site and your design?
These sectors can change over time. For instance, the sun, in winter, will cast shade in a different place than it does in the summer. This can matter if you’re placing a veggie garden that needs sun in the winter, for instance. Sun aspect can also affect solar placement, and decisions about your house that could capture more sun heat, or block it. Rain or wind may be heavier at certain times of year as well. In our video, we go into more depth on the sun aspect.
Use knowledge of sectors to place design components to manage incoming energy.
- Block the incoming energy
- Channel the energy where you want it
- Open the area to allow incoming energy to come in
Examples of sectors:
- seasonal sun angles, shade
- wind - hot, drying, salty, cold, dusty, hard
- rainfall patterns
- noise (such as a nearby freeway)
- air or water pollution or other toxicity coming onto the site
- running water
- swamp, or flooding
- wildfire
- view
- utilities, sewer
- neighbors (are they doing things that impact your property?)
- wildlife (corridors, access)
- traffic
- pollen
- reflection from ponds
You can mark sectors on your map in several ways. The most common is to use an arrow to denote where the sector is coming from, and name what it is. For sun angle, you can mark where the shade will fall in the winter to denote where not to put a sun loving winter garden. I do this by visual memory. I know where the sun is during solstices and equinoxes on my land. You can get apps like suncalc that can show you where it is. This tells you where the shade will be at different times of year.
We’ve included some tools in the Site Assessment Resources document (in Permaculture Design Tools/Class Assignment section, lesson #5) to check on some sectors like sun angles, flood plains, wind, etc.
Below are some examples of sector maps. There are many ways to express sectors. The important thing is to make clear how wide the sector entrance onto your land is, and what direction it’s coming from, and to make the map readable and understandable.
This is a simple sector map of a site in Australia (thus the sun is in the north in winter). It shows where the sun rises and sets in summer and winter, and where prevailing winds come from. You could also show, for instance, where deer enter the property in a similar way.
This map is a bit more abstract and is used by professionals. It works best if you use different colors for each sector, which often do not come out clearly in graphics applications. The more clarity, the easier it is to understand. The sun sectors indicate where the sun rises and sets in the winter and summer. The other sectors indicate which direction that sector influence tends to come from.
A sector map could be as simple or complex as you like. The important thing is that it helps you to see where outside influences come into the site so you can think about what you might want to do about that.
There are many ways to find out more information about sectors in your region. There are flood plain maps kept by local water authorities and USGS, long term wind patterns via weatherspark.com, and other data available. See our site assessment resources document for more info. That document is far from complete – there is a plethora of information available online. We provide some of the key resources we use most regularly.
Hands On Activity
Walk around your site (or any piece of property), and note where the sun and shade are. Note this at different times of day - morning, noon and evening. Think about where the sun and shade would be in the summer, with the sun directly overhead, and winter, with it low in the sky.
Walk around your site and look for energies that might enter. Look for places where water might enter your land from other locations, via a stream, wetlands, or downslope. Note where it might flow. It's great to do this during or right after a good rain, but you may also be able to see patterns in your yard that could indicate where water sits. This is something you'll learn over time, but one example is the dollarweed, which indicates a place where water may sit for a time after rain.
Note wind patterns in your yard. These can be tricky - it's great training to stand in your yard and feel where the wind is going and where it is strongest when it is blowing from different directions.
Note where wildlife or stray pets may enter your yard, and anything else that might come from outside your yard, like noise, or odors, or views. Note these down. In your design process, you'll consider ways to block energies you don't want, embrace and use the ones you do, and store energies you can't use right away but could use later.
One example of storing energies are oak leaves from a neighbor's tree that would fall in our yard. We gathered them and used them in our compost pile; they're very valuable compost additions. In fact, we would go out and gather bags of leaves from neighbors that raked and bagged them; thus going outside our site to gather "sector" energy that was desirable.
Draw these sectors on a copy of your base map (or use tracing paper).