Ecosystem Services最新文献

Urban green areas, such as parks, squares, and tree-lined streets, are part of nature-based solutions (NBS) that provide ecosystem services to address these urban issues. However, there is limited knowledge about the contribution of tree species and overall ecosystem services provided by urban trees under public management, especially in Latin America. This study aimed to provide information on the contribution of urban trees in reducing highly incident pollutants, such as CO₂, particulate matter (PM 2. 5 and 10), and greenhouse effect gas compounds (GEG) in the city of Lima (Peru), using the I-tree package software tool for estimating ecosystem services. The results demonstrate that urban trees under public management in Lima significantly contribute to pollutant reduction and the sequestration and storage of CO₂ in the city, being that storage is nearly 50% of the levels observed in native temperate forests in Latin America and higher than the value measured in some xerophytic native forests in the same region. Other evaluated pollutantś levels are significantly reduced. Differences among tree species were observed, showing amatillo (Ficus pertusa L. f.) and red eucalyptus (Eucalyptus camaldulensis Dehnh.) as higher contributions to pollutant reduction, with Erythrina falcata Benth. as a native species having significant carbon storage (1,27 t/individual).

This information is highly relevant for professionals and public institutions involved in urban planning and management, particularly urban tree management. It shows that tree species selection influences the mitigation of pollutant levels in cities while increasing other ecosystem services, thereby contributing to improving citizens' health.

Air pollution on a worldwide scale poses significant risks to our health and food security. Trees, as ecosystem units, play a huge role in mitigating air pollution but quantifying this ecosystem service in the most polluted regions of the world is difficult due to a lack of relevant data. The ability of trees to mitigate air emissions is evaluated by the i-Tree Eco tool, which uses the tree inventory data based on high-resolution data such as LiDAR, which is predominantly available for the countries in the global north. In contrast, for most countries in the global south, collating such information is difficult and, therefore, obtaining the tree inventory and usage of i-Tree Eco is challenging. To circumvent these lacunae, in this study, we propose a method hinging on remote sensing based on readily available Landsat satellite images. We validate our approach on Balboa Park, San Diego, California, for which both LiDAR and Landsat data are available, and showcase its applicability to the South Delhi and Chennai city regions of India, where LiDAR data are not available.

Linear landscape elements, such as field margins, are agricultural practices whose adoption is supported by agri-environmental climate measures (AECMs). AECMs are meant to improve ecological conditions on farms and surrounding areas. The effectiveness of AECMs to enhance the supply of multiple ecosystem services (ESs) is still debated and knowledge on the resulting ESs bundles under different practices stemming from AECMs is still lacking. We aimed at assessing the potential of AECMs that promote the implementation of linear landscape elements to provide high levels of multiple ESs and at analyzing bundles at landscape level in different geographical contexts. We assessed the potential effects of linear landscape elements (woody, grassy, flower and a mix) on six ESs (food and feed provision, pollination, pest control, climate regulation, aesthetics, and habitat maintenance), combining scenarios and spatially explicit modelling approaches. Our results showed the positive effects of linear landscape elements on all regulating and cultural ESs. The more abundant the linear elements, the higher the overall ESs supply. However, the effect of linear landscape elements on multiple ESs depended on the types of linear elements and the geographical context of their implementation. When the supply of the ES was already high in the baseline situation, the changes induced by the implementation of the linear elements were much lower than when the baseline situation showed a lower initial supply of one or several of the ESs. Our analyses give insights on the efficiency of AECMs on multiple environmental targets. Our approach is a first step towards a general framework for an ex-ante integrated analysis of AECMs that can be used to design agri-environmental policies. From a more practical perspective, our results can form a basis for additional payments for AECMs. Our study also confirms the relevance of the EU biodiversity strategy that commits to ensure at least 10% of agricultural area as high-biodiversity landscape features such as linear landscape elements, and the relevance of the enhanced conditionality and eco-schemes in the reformed Common agricultural Policy targeting non-productive elements and biodiversity.

Ecosystem services are crucial for urban resilience, climate change adaptation and mitigation, and sustainable development. Incorporating these services in urban environments involves various principles, partnerships, organizational strategies, and methodologies. A vast body of research exists on ecosystem services. However, there is a lack of studies that address equity concerns in access to urban ecosystem services. This paper critically reviews the literature to investigate the state of access to ecosystem services in urban areas. We use deductive content analysis for this purpose. We explore traditional concepts of justice and update them by examining the sources and types of ecosystem services in urban environments. We examine justice typology considering various social, environmental, infrastructural, ecological, and mobility issues. We also explore different justice dimensions, including distributional, procedural, recognitional, and restorative issues. Results showed a notable prioritization of green infrastructures (73%) over blue infrastructures (5%). Furthermore, there has been an apparent emphasis on cultural services (42%) and regulating services (25%) in offering recreational activities, fostering social integration, improving place-making capabilities, showcasing adaptability, and demonstrating resilience. An important finding is that most of the publications (87%) highlight that there is no justice in access to ecosystem services. Regarding typologies, we found that there has been more attention to environmental justice, and infrastructural, ecological, and mobility justice are underexplored. As for dimensions, more attention has been paid to distributional and recognitional justice at the cost of restorative justice. A key shortcoming is that cities in the Global South are not adequately represented in the literature, despite their significance for achieving sustainable urban development in the coming decades.

Floodplains are among the most valuable and most threatened ecosystems. Worldwide, degradation and restoration are taking place at the same time. In Germany, more than 90% of the floodplains are degraded, and restoration is carried out through several projects because the benefits floodplains provide are already known, though not yet quantified. Decision makers and politicians are still in need of economic values, e.g. for cost-benefit analyses. Therefore, we sought to conduct a review of ecosystem services (ES) in German floodplains to provide a policy-relevant summary of estimated ES valuation efforts. While there are many reviews and meta-analyses in the scientific literature, they use data on an international scale. While international synthesis has value, assuming internationally synthesized values can be used to represent local or national values can be problematic due to unknowable transfer errors. In focusing on only German studies, we found that there were not enough data available for a German floodplain meta-analysis or review that could produce locally policy-relevant information. Only five floodplain ES were investigated in 14 studies between the years 2000 and 2021 within Germany, which provided enough data and study descriptions for a comparison of homogenized values. In total, ES of more than 4000 €²⁰¹⁵/ha/yr were provided for German floodplains, which is much lower than global reviews, however, because of which and how ES are considered. There is an urgent need for representative studies examining how ecosystem values are generated and perceived to provide locally relevant information. There is a strong focus within meta-analytical studies on the international scale to overcome the data scarcity issue at the expense of local relevance. This is a fundamental trade-off that must be acknowledged.

National Forest Parks (NFPs) represent the highest level of the forest park system in China and have long been considered to cultivate positive experiences among visitors through their rich cultural services. However, there is limited knowledge of the relationship between the cultural dimension of landscape services (CLSs) in NFPs and visitors’ positive experiences. This study represents the first effort to investigate the effects of NFP CLSs on visitors’ expressed sentiments and aims to further identify the relative importance of various CLS features. A total of 267 NFPs across 31 provinces in China were selected as case studies, and approximately 300,000 visitors’ online comments from a widely used travel platform (CTrip) were obtained for sentiment analysis using natural language processing. A novel systematic framework for assessing CLSs was proposed, encompassing five principal features and 19 indicator subcategories. Ordinary least-squares and spatial regression models were used to reveal associations between NFP CLSs and expressed sentiments, whereas the XGBoost model and Shapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) values were employed to identify the relative importance of NFP CLS features. Three major findings were observed: First, the feature scoring of CLSs in NFPs was unevenly distributed across the country, with scores along the eastern seaboard relatively higher than those inland in the northwest. Second, beneficial associations between the five principal CLS features and visitors’ expressed sentiments were suggested. Third, the influence of landscape aesthetics was particularly prominent in promoting visitors’ positive sentiments, followed by education, physical activities and health, recreation and tourism, and cultural heritage and spiritual practices. These findings provide valuable insights for health-oriented NFP management, policies, and planning.

In 2012 we sought to operationalize ecosystem services for governance, and asked in our Ecosystem Services paper (Primmer and Furman, 2012): “Do measuring, mapping and valuing integrate sector-specific knowledge systems?” Since our paper, much operationalization and innovation work has been done toward integration. In this paper, we analyze articles addressing governance of ecosystem services and measuring, mapping and valuation from 2013 to today. Our review shows that much of the research addressing governance does it in relatively distanced ways, suggesting analytical and operational tools and improvements, rather than analyzing governance in-depth. Yet, it is apparent that over the ten years, inventorying of ecosystem services has given way to meaningfully integrated assessments and trade-off analyses as well as to in-depth analyses of stakeholder perceptions and argumentation. Participatory approaches, stakeholder mapping and actors’ roles have been integrated with more technical mapping, grounding analyses in decision-making. Valuation has become routine, yet also more explorative and in-depth, feeding to specific decision-making situations and general policy discussions. Based on the still existing gaps, we suggest that while measuring, mapping and governance should continue to be integrated into governance processes, also the political and administrative processes driving governance need a strong message from the scientific community analyzing ecosystem services governance; so strong that it is on par with the alarming messages about the state and trends of biodiversity and ecosystem services. Governance research has already produced the core message: Securing sustainability of ecosystem service provision, together with safeguarding ecosystem functions and the biodiversity that those functions rely on, requires knowledge integrating locally adapted tools and engaging transparent policy processes.

Understanding the potential tradeoffs in the social perceptions of ecosystem services (ED) and disservices (EDS) may help decision-making when managing human-modified landscapes like agroecosystems. These tradeoffs are critical when ES and EDS come from the same “provider”. Using bats as a provider example, we show how understanding tradeoffs between ES and EDS may assist in exploring management actions to mitigate human-bat conflicts and thus promote bat conservation. We used a socio-cultural approach consisting of focus groups and individual stakeholder interviews. People noticed more EDS than ES related to the presence of bats, mainly personal security (fear of attacks) and health (risk of disease transmission). Suppression of insect agricultural pests was the most frequently mentioned service. Incomplete and distorted information from mass media sources strongly influences people’s perceptions of bats. Avoiding human-bat contact may help counteract the fear, insecurity and unpleasantness people perceive from bats. Innovative management interventions, such as bat boxes and other artificial roosts, may help to favour bat conservation and their role in the agroecosystem, while other management actions (e.g., educational programs to reinforce ES) help balance ES and EDS tradeoffs. Nevertheless, balancing the tradeoffs in people’s perceptions of ES and EDS related to bats and collaboration among public and private institutions is necessary to facilitate conservation, management, and environmental education. Our findings recognise society’s challenges and how best to identify, protect, and conserve critical human and ecosystem health services in agroecosystems and human-modified landscapes.

In an increasingly urbanized world, the concepts of ecosystem services and nature-based solutions can help tackle grand challenges. However, ambiguity in their definitions and in the relationship between the two concepts complicates comprehensive research efforts as well as their effective application in policy and planning in urban systems. This paper presents a framework to clarify and explicitly relate the two concepts, enhancing their applicability in the management of urban challenges. Within the framework, addressing urban challenges serves as the starting point for the development and implementation of nature-based solutions. Nature-based solutions alter the flows of ecosystem services that are produced by an ecosystem by altering the performance of the ecosystem or by changing how people engage with the ecosystem. This results both in changes in the target ecosystem services, as well as non-targeted ecosystem services, leading to benefits. Using two illustrative case studies, we show how the framework can be applied to two urban challenges that are expected to increase in intensity in cities across the world: stormwater management and urban heat stress. Moreover, we highlight key research topics that will benefit from more integrated use of nature-based solutions and ecosystem services. The framework helps emphasize co-benefits, and can be used to help make co-benefits and multifunctionality explicit in urban decision-making and planning processes.

This paper presents a global synthesis of economic values for ecosystem services provided by 15 terrestrial and marine biomes. Information from over 1,300 studies, yielding over 9,400 value estimates in monetary units, has been collected and organised in the Ecosystem Services Valuation Database (ESVD). This is a substantial expansion of data since the de Groot et al. (2012) description of the ESVD and provides an important juncture to explore developments in the use of valuation methods and the contexts in which valuations are conducted. In this paper we provide summary values for 23 ecosystem services from 15 biomes to represent the magnitude, variation and gaps in economic values. To enable the comparison and synthesis of values, estimates in the ESVD are standardised to a common set of units (Int$/ha/year at 2020 price levels). This data provides a basis for value transfers to inform decision-making in current policy contexts but requires due consideration and adjustment for context specific determinants of value.

Although the coverage of the ESVD is global, the geographic distribution of data is not even. There is a particularly high representation of European ecosystems and relatively little information for Russia, Central Asia and North Africa. Therefore, the data are not globally representative of biophysical and socio-economic contexts. The distribution of data across ecosystem services is also far from even, with some services very well represented (e.g. recreation, wild fish and wild animals, ecosystem and species appreciation, air filtration and global climate regulation) and others with almost no value estimates (e.g. disease control, water baseflow maintenance, rainfall pattern regulation).

In the past decade, there has been a notable increase in demand for information on the economic value of ecosystem services from both public and private institutions to improve the conservation and management of natural capital. The literature is developing to meet this demand but there is a need for targeted and refined valuation research to ensure sufficient certainty, comparability, and representativeness of the data, and to enable transferability and fill knowledge gaps. This paper concludes by identifying avenues for future development to further increase the amount, quality, representativeness and application of data on economic values for ecosystem services.