The impact of land use/land cover scale on modelling urban ecosystem services

Abstract

Context Urbanisation places increasing stress on ecosystem services; however existing methods and data for testing relationships between service delivery and urban landscapes remain imprecise and uncertain. Unknown impacts of scale are among several factors that complicate research. This study models ecosystem services in the urban area comprising the towns of Milton Keynes, Bedford and Luton which together represent a wide range of the urban forms present in the UK. Objectives The objectives of this study were to test (1) the sensitivity of ecosystem service model outputs to the spatial resolution of input data, and (2) whether any resultant scale dependency is constant across different ecosystem services and model approaches (e.g. stock-versus flow-based).Methods Carbon storage, sediment erosion, and pollination were modelled with the InVEST framework using input data representative of common coarse (25 m) and fine (5 m) spatial resolutions. Results Fine scale analysis generated higher estimates of total carbon storage (9.32 vs. 7.17 kg m -2 ) and much lower potential sediment erosion estimates (6.4 vs. 18.1 Mg km -2 year -1 ) than analyses conducted at coarser resolutions; however coarse-scale analysis estimated more abundant pollination service provision. Conclusions Scale sensitivities depend on the type of service being modelled; stock estimates (e.g. carbon storage) are most sensitive to aggregation across scales, dynamic flow models (e.g. sediment erosion) are most sensitive to spatial resolution, and ecological process models involving both stocks and dynamics (e.g. pollination) are sensitive to both. Care must be taken to select model data appropriate to the scale of inquiry.

A bird’s eye view: using circuit theory to study urban landscape connectivity for birds

“…Rayfield et al 2010). However, current graph theoretical approaches can also become computationally unfeasible when dealing with high-resolution GIS grids (Moilanen 2011), which may be necessary to capture adequate levels of detail for urban ecological studies (Grafius et al 2016). Additionally, they remain limited in their ability to consider the spatial patterns of the landscape between habitat nodes.…”

Mapping and Quantifying Variations in Ecosystem Services of Urban Green Spaces: A Test Case of Carbon Sequestration at the District Scale for Seoul, Korea (1975–2015)

“…The potential for urban habitats to capture and store atmospheric carbon is increasingly important amid growing concerns over the role played by anthropogenic CO2 in global climate change (Grafius et al, 2016;Lee, Lee, & Lee, 2015). Thus, in this research carbon sequestration (CS) is chosen as a test case, and the response of CS to landscape changes is explored.…”

Assessing and Improving the Reliability of Volunteered Land Cover Reference Data

“…Land cover and land cover change data are an essential input to a wide range of applications, e.g., Earth system modeling, urban planning, resource management, and biodiversity conservation, among others [1][2][3]. Therefore, accurate and up-to-date land cover maps are required.…”

“…The first is to gain a better understanding of where volunteers had difficulties in visual interpretation, as formulated in these two research questions: (1) What are the areas where the largest interpretation difficulties occur and why? (2) What are the land cover types with the largest interpretation difficulties and why?…”