•We examined the impact of land use/land cover dynamics on ecosystem services value (ESV).•The total value of ecosystem services increased by 4.51 × 1021 seJ during 1990 and 2015.•The value of ...ecosystem services for forests was the highest, accounting for 46–49% of the total value of ecosystem services.•A matrix of ecosystem service values for land-use transformation was developed in this study.
Ecosystem services value has decreased rapidly caused by land use/land cover changes driven by urbanization during the past decades. Expanding urbanization not only changes the spatial distribution of areas of ecosystem service demand but it also changes the potential functions of ecosystem services. It is necessary to undertake a quantitative analysis of historical changes in land use/land cover in the context of the urban land sprawl to better understand existing relationships between ecological services and land use/land cover change. The methodology for this study was derived from an established knowledge base on the importance of land use/land cover types for the supply of each of nine identified ecosystem services extracted from a review of the literature. We selected the Pearl River Delta as the object of our study and used a land-use dataset entailing a resolution of 100 m to analyze the land use/land cover change trends and the values of ecosystem services in this region from 1990 to 2015. Furthermore, we compiled a summary of changes in the values of ecosystem services caused by changes in land use/land cover. We found that the change trend of land use/land cover in the Pearl River Delta, which is dominated by forests, reflected a highly dynamic context. Construction land increased from 2909.77 km2 to 7486.89 km2 over the study period. The total value of ecosystem services increased by 4.5 × 1021 seJ during the period 1990–2015. Individual ecosystem services that contributed the greatest value were hydrological regulation, climate regulation, and soil formation and retention. In light of our findings, we developed a matrix of ecosystem service values in relation to land use transitions and explored its policy implications for ecosystem management. This matrix can help decision makers to better understand tradeoffs between ecosystem services caused by land use/land cover changes.
Assessing perceptions of green spaces is of considerable interest to developers aiming for sustainable urbanization. However, there are numerous challenges facing the development of a rapid, ...effective, and fine-grained method to assess large-scale greenspace perception. Survey-based studies of perception yielded detailed assessments of green spaces but lacked regional comparisons. The few big-data-based studies of greenspace perception lacked fine-grained explorations. Therefore, we used content analysis to interpret perception in two ways: perceived frequency and perceived satisfaction, including overall park satisfaction and satisfaction with individual landscape features. We analyzed social media posts about urban parks in Beijing, China. A structured lexicon was developed to capture detailed landscape features, and machine learning was employed to assess satisfaction levels. Both of these techniques performed well in interpreting greenspace satisfaction from volunteered textual comments. A detailed study of 50 parks demonstrated that overall park satisfaction was positive. Additionally, individual landscape features were more influential than frequency of landscape features in affecting satisfaction. Our framework confirmed the potential of online comments as complementary to traditional surveys in assessing greenspace perception, while enhancing our understanding of this perception on a regional scale. Practically, this study can facilitate sustainable policy-making regarding urban green spaces, specifically through offering a structured landscape-feature lexicon, rapid regional comparison of various parks, and an emphasis on quality rather than quantity of landscape features.
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•We used social media data to assess user satisfaction with 50 parks in Beijing.•A landscape-feature lexicon allowed for fine-grained analysis of user preferences.•Feature quality and not quantity influence user satisfaction with parks.•This combination of detail and regional scale facilitates sustainable urbanization.
Land-use changes, especially urbanization, have largely impacted the capacity of ecosystems to deliver ecosystem services (ES) on which human wellbeing depends. The current sectorial landscape and ...territorial planning approaches that separately address protected areas and urban areas have proven ineffective in conserving biodiversity. To address this important challenge, integrated territorial planning has been claimed to be able to better reconcile interests between nature conservation and urban planning, and ES supply and demand mapping may be a useful tool for such purposes. In this study, we quantitatively mapped biodiversity and the supply and demand of eight ES along an urban-rural gradient in the region of Madrid (Spain). Then, we clustered the municipalities in this gradient into four groups based on their common biodiversity and ES supply and demand characteristics. Additionally, we reviewed the urban plans from these municipalities and the management plans of three protected areas, analysed the references to ES in the plans, and searched for potential conflicts between urban and protected area planning aims. We found that municipalities with highly coupled ES supply and demand are in high altitude areas, coinciding with protected areas, while in urban areas, the ES demand exceeds the supply. Municipalities exhibiting a high demand for regulating ES usually include them in their plans, while municipalities with a high supply of regulating ES do not. Given the several conflicts between protected areas and urban planning that we detected, we discuss the utility of mapping biodiversity and ES supply and demand beyond administrative boundaries to overcome the challenge of integrating spatial planning approaches, especially in the context of urban-rural gradients and megacities. We also explore the utility of these methods for coordinating urban planning tools to achieve integrated territorial planning.
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•Mapping biodiversity and ecosystem services informs integrated territorial planning.•Planning tools for urban and protected areas promote an urban-rural dichotomy.•Urban-rural dichotomies lead to environmental challenges and conflict.•Ecosystem services demand drives municipalities to incorporate them in planning tools.
Natural habitats in rural and urban areas are increasingly fragmented and altered by human impacts that are limiting the animal and plant dispersal process. Fragmentation and isolation can be ...reversed by restoring landscape connectivity through effective Ecological Network (EN) planning. However, most of the studies analyzing the influence of connectivity and landscape structure on biodiversity are focused on animals, while the understanding of their interplaying role on plant diversity remains limited.
We studied the relationships between α and β diversity pattern and landscape structure and connectivity in the nodes of an EN developed in agricultural landscapes, as a part of regional landscape planning framework in Friuli Venezia Giulia region (North-East of Italy). As an innovation, the study aims at parsing the interacting effect of landscape structure, surrounding habitats and nodes, and structural connectivity on EN plant diversity at two specific scales of investigation i.e., the habitat and the node scale. The habitat was the basic ecological unit, while the node was the basic cartographical unit for the EN mapping (multi-habitat or mono-habitat nodes).
A total of 443 plant species were collected across 219 sample plots, in 14 different habitats and 87 nodes of the EN. We found that high node connectivity leads to higher species richness (α-diversity) but also increases plant community similarity (i.e., low β-diversity) at both scales. The effect of landscape structure showed differing trends depending on the habitat. In general, landscape composition of semi-natural land cover (i.e., hedgerows, watercourses) showed a positive effect on species diversity as opposed to that of the configuration of anthropogenic elements on both scales. Our results provided crucial information on the landscape processes useful to improving biodiversity conservation by EN. Our findings suggest that i) improving connectivity within ENs favors α plant diversity ii) different habitats have different sensibility to landscape structure iii) semi-natural land cover around nodes improve plant diversity; iv) planning both mono-habitat and multi-habitats nodes, increases the biodiversity conserved therein; v) nodes with more compact shapes are to be preferred.
•The understanding of the influence of connectivity and landscape structure on plant diversity is limited.•Both α and β diversity were considered as response variables.•The effects of connectivity and landscape structure on plant diversity were investigated at two scales.•Improved connectivity leads to greater species richness but also increases community similarity.•Our results provided crucial information useful to improving biodiversity conservation by EN.
•Six ecological services and minimum cumulative resistance model were used to design ESP.•Gravity model and probability of connectivity index were to evaluate ESP.•The important ecological patches ...were in the northwest and southeast Jingmen.•We identifed 15 priority protection areas and 11 restoration areas.•The recommended optimal width of corridors is 100 m–200 m.
As urbanization continues, ecosystem stability faces serious challenges. Ecological security patterns have become a main tool with which the contradictions between economic development and ecological security can be alleviated and even solved.
In this study, ecological patches were identified based on ecosystem services, and ecological corridors were derived using a minimum cumulative resistance model. We analyzed the importance and connectivity of ecological corridors using a gravity model and the probability of connectivity index and identified key restoration and protection areas.
The results show that (1) 72 ecological patches were identified in Jingmen, and important patches were distributed in the western mountainous areas of Jingmen. (2) The corridor connectivity in Jingmen needs to be improved. The 71 ecological corridors with the lowest cumulative resistance were identified; these corridors were mainly concentrated in mountainous areas, forest parks, and wetland parks.
We suggested 100–200 m as the ecological corridor width in Jingmen, as this width could balance the economic development, ecological conservation, and food security priorities. We identified 15 priority protection areas and 11 priority restoration areas that urgently require reasonable ecological restoration in Jingmen. This construction of an ecological security pattern in Jingmen provides a scientific reference for urban ecological planning and urban spatial layout planning and achieves a win–win situation in which both smart urban growth and ecological protection can be realized.
Despite the growing body of literature on ecosystem services, still many challenges remain to structurally integrate ecosystem services in landscape planning, management and design. This paper ...therefore aims to provide an overview of the challenges involved in applying ecosystem service assessment and valuation to environmental management and discuss some solutions to come to a comprehensive and practical framework.
First the issue of defining and classifying ecosystem services is discussed followed by approaches to quantify and value ecosystem services. The main part of the paper is focussed on the question how to analyze trade-offs involved in land cover and land use change, including spatial analysis and dynamic modelling tools. Issues of scale are addressed, as well as the question how to determine the total economic value of different management states.
Finally, developments and challenges regarding the inclusion of ecosystem services in integrative landscape planning and decision-making tools are discussed.
It is concluded that the ecosystem service approach and ecosystem service valuation efforts have changed the terms of discussion on nature conservation, natural resource management, and other areas of public policy. It is now widely recognized that nature conservation and conservation management strategies do not necessarily pose a trade-off between the “environment” and “development”. Investments in conservation, restoration and sustainable ecosystem use are increasingly seen as a “win-win situation” which generates substantial ecological, social and economic benefits.
Nature-based solutions (NBS) find increasing attention as actions to address societal challenges through harnessing ecological processes, yet knowledge gaps exist regarding approaches to landscape ...planning with NBS. This paper aims to provide suggestions of how planning NBS can be conceptualized and applied in practice. We develop a framework for planning NBS by merging insights from literature and a case study in the Lahn river landscape, Germany. Our framework relates to three key criteria that define NBS, and consists of six steps of planning:
Co-define setting
,
Understand challenges
,
Create visions and scenarios
,
Assess potential impacts
,
Develop solution strategies
, and
Realize and monitor
. Its implementation is guided by five principles, namely
Place-specificity
,
Evidence base
,
Integration
,
Equity,
and
Transdisciplinarity
. Drawing on the empirical insights from the case study, we suggest suitable methods and a checklist of supportive procedures for applying the framework in practice. Taken together, our framework can facilitate planning NBS and provides further steps towards mainstreaming.
This paper provides brief context and a critical overview of the video presented
as an integral part of this publication. In one hour the video documents
excerpts from over five hours of an ...interdisciplinary seminar at Summerhall in
Edinburgh, Scotland on 1 October 2016. The group assembled to consider a cluster
of three post-industrial shale oil bings: as an artwork, as a form with positive
and negative aesthetic value, as a living landscape and an ecosystem, and as a
national heritage site. We wanted to talk about the bings in the context of
mining and waste pile recovery schemes from the point of view of art and its
ability to reveal divergent public interests. Furthermore we wanted to consider
the bings as a unique living ecological habitat. By embracing an
interdisciplinary network approach to the conflicted meanings of one specific
post-industrial landscape, we intended to explore positive and negative
aesthetics, ethics and moral philosophy to better understand how competing
meanings reveal, complement or overshadow historic judgements, current
perceptions and future values.
Preserving wilderness areas is one of the key goals in the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework(GBF). However, far too little attention has been paid to identifying wilderness conservation ...priorities on the national scale. In this study, we developed a methodological framework to evaluate the ecosystem service values, potential loss and conservation priorities of wilderness areas in China, providing guidance for wilderness conservation. First, we assessed the conservation value of wilderness areas and found that wilderness areas provided more ecosystem services than non-wilderness areas per unit area in most ecoregions. Then we identified threatened wilderness areas under multiple scenarios due to land use and land cover change. We found that 5.82 % of the existing wilderness areas were projected to be lost by 2100. Finally, wilderness conservation priorities were identified considering both conservation values and potential loss, and 11.24 % of existing wilderness areas were highlighted as conservation priorities. This methodological framework could be applied to other countries to support post-2020 global biodiversity conservation.
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•A framework for identifying wilderness conservation priorities is proposed.•Wilderness areas provides crucial and multiple ecosystem services.•In China, 5.82 % of wilderness areas are projected to be lost by 2100.•In China, 11.24 % of wilderness areas are highlighted as conservation priorities.
•High perceived naturalness generated more activities, higher aesthetic values and well-being for residents in vicinity of urban green spaces.•Women are more active, see greater aesthetic value and ...have higher well-being associated with green spaces.•Older residents participate in a greater number of nature-related activities than younger residents.•Older residents sees greater aesthetic values and have higher well-being associated with urban green spaces than younger people.
Neighbourhood green space serves an important function for the urban population, and provides valuable ecosystem services for human well-being. In this article, we investigate the effects of naturalness, gender, and age on the activities, aesthetics, and self-reported well-being associated with urban green space. Our findings are based on a postal survey of residents living in close proximity to six different green spaces in the city of Gothenburg, Sweden. It is shown that higher perceived naturalness generated more activities and higher aesthetic values and self-reported well-being for residents living close to urban green spaces. The results also indicated that, regardless of the type of naturalness, women were more active in urban green spaces than were men. Women also saw greater aesthetic value in green spaces than men did, and had higher self-reported well-being associated with the urban green spaces. Finally, older residents were shown to participate in a greater number of nature-related activities than younger residents. Older residents also saw greater aesthetic values and had higher self-reported well-being associated with urban green spaces than younger people did. Seemingly, this poses a considerable planning challenge if areas of perceived naturalness are to be retained in cities, since the present trend is for reduced green spaces in cities and a ‘parkification’ of surviving natural areas. Further, because of the importance of perceived natural areas to the elderly, and in particularly women, distances to urban green areas should not be too great.
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