Biodiversity based solutions for the support of ecosystem services, provided by urban green infrastructure

Abstract

Compact living of the population in the territory of modern cities on the one hand increases requirements for the quality of environmental conditions, and on the other hand creates an excessive load on the city ecosystem. Green spaces are the main providers of ecosystem services in cities, as urban fauna represented by a very limited number of species. The quality and range of ecosystems of their services, which provided by natural plant associations and urban green spaces, is significantly different and affected by human activity. The assessment of the quality of provision of ecosystem services by the parks of the left bank of the city was carried out Kyiv. At the first stage of the work, an assessment of the potential of service provision was carried out according to 10 criteria. At the second stage, the ratio between cultural and regulatory ecosystem services provided by the parks was performed using pair-wise weighted evaluation. The assessment results show that large, little-altered forest parks provide the highest degree of services, in which regulatory services dominate over recreational ones. Along with this, small lakes ecosystems under the condition of limited recreational improvement and use can also provide more services of a regulatory nature. Traditionally, the main means of ensuring the ecosystems services and adaptation of cities to the conditions of a changing climate are nature-based solutions. Given the scarcity of free space, such solutions include a number of conceptually new approaches that provide maximum involvement of spatial resources of the city, in particular walls and roofs. Such decisions are important and effective, but technical aspects may delay their implementation. Under such conditions it is proposed to pay attention to biodiversity-based solutions, i.e. increasing species richness in already existing facilities to improve the quality of the provided services in general and increase the weight of regulatory services. The attention should be paid to increasing the diversity of species and communities. The increase in species diversity can be implemented in planned manner maintenance of existing plantations taking into account not only the tolerance of the selected species, but also in accordance with their functional role. This will contribute to the expansion of ecological niches of plantations and natural processes of diversification.