Ecological Land Adaptive Planning in Macroscale, Mesoscale, and Microscale of Shanghai

Abstract

The urban ecosystems in China have been compromised during the process of urbanization. The declining services of ecological lands have hindered the sustainable development of cities and the current ecological land management (regulations, rules, and laws) in China cannot meet the demand of future development. In this paper, a new multiscale systematic adaptive ecological land planning method is proposed. Shanghai, a typical mega-city in China, was chosen as the research area. To scientifically and adaptively manage ecological land, downscale management was used and macroscales (city), mesoscales (town), and microscales (community) were chosen. In different scales, different indicators were chosen as evaluation criteria to evaluate the services of the lands. At the mesoscale, habitat quality, carbon sequestration, water conservation, and soil fertility maintenance were chosen. At the mesoscale, habitat quality, carbon sequestration capacity, water production service and food supply were chosen as the evaluation criteria. These indicators are used to evaluate the importance levels of corresponding areas. Based on the importance levels of macroscales and mesoscales, three different scenarios with different targets of Changtian Community were proposed. All three scenarios were judged by stakeholders (residents and managers) of the community and a final scenario was proposed to meet all the requirements. This research not only provides theoretical reference and technical support for ecological land management in different scales of Shanghai, but also provides a new method of adaptive ecological land planning in megacities.