Changes in the value of ecosystem services along a rural–urban gradient: A case study of Greater Manchester, UK

Variation in ecosystem services across an urbanization gradient: A study of terrestrial carbon stocks from Changzhou, China

“…The integrative concept of ecosystem services in urban areas is defined as multiple environmental benefits urban dwellers obtain from urban-rural landscapes (Radford and James, 2013). Over the past decades, the impacts of urbanization on ecosystem services extend over large areas even though urban land occupies a small proportion of the land cover matrices in most regions (Wade et al, 2009).…”

“…These profound changes in land use and climate have highlighted the role of ecosystem services in sustainable urban development and climate change mitigation and adaptation (Goldstein et al, 2012). Increasingly, land use policies are recognizing the importance of urbanization as a major driver of land use change across the world, and that a better understanding of how ecosystem services are provided along urban-rural gradients is crucial in the task of conserving and enhancing ecosystem services (Davies et al, 2011;Radford and James, 2013). However, there have been surprisingly few attempts and effective modeling approach explicitly to quantify the provision of multiple ecosystem services with regard to urbanization at a city-wide scale (Chan et al, 2006;Daily et al, 2009;Nelson et al, 2009;Kroll et al, 2012).…”

“…This implied that the significant increase in aboveground biomass per unit area that they observed with increasing distance from the urban center resulted mainly from changes in the distribution of land covers. Therefore, carbon stocks can be estimated based on land cover types to quantify their variation across the urbanization gradient (Turner et al, 2007;Yeh and Huang, 2009), both between the urban center and periurban areas as defined by the administrative boundaries (Radford and James, 2013) and along sample transects (Kroll et al, 2012;Larondelle and Haase, 2013).…”

Assessing the changes in land use and ecosystem services in Changzhou municipality, Peoples’ Republic of China, 1991–2006

“…Land use and cover change to build cities and support their population drives local to global alterations of primary productivity, biogeochemical cycles, climate, hydrosystems and biodiversity (Alberti, 2005;Grimm et al, 2008). Changes in land use potentially undermine the capacity of ecosystems to sustain food production, maintain freshwater and forest resources, regulate climate and air quality (Foley et al, 2005), Trade-offs between different urban ecosystem services along a rural-urban gradient should be considered during urban planning (Kroll et al, 2012;Larondelle and Haase, 2013;Radford and James, 2013). The millennium ecosystem assessment provided a baseline for ecosystem services studies (MA, 2005a,b) and TEEB (2010) collected knowledge on appropriate valuation methods for ecosystem services.…”

Measurement methods and applications for beneficial and detrimental effects of ecological services

“…Urban ecosystem services are defined as those services provided by the urban ecosystem and its components (Bolund and Hunhammar, 1999;Kroll et al, 2012;Gómez-Baggethun and Barton, 2013;Larondelle and Haase, 2013;Radford and James, 2013). These refer to the ability of an urban ecosystem to provide tangible or intangible natural products, environmental resources, and commonweal that maintain the production, consumption, distribution, restoration, and regulation activities of human society in urban areas (Wang et al, 2004).…”