Assessing Ecosystem and Urban Services for Landscape Suitability Mapping

Sara Antognelli,Marco Vizzari

doi:10.3390/app11178232

Abstract

Ecosystem services (ES) and urban services (US) can comparably improve human well-being. Models for integrating ES and US with unexpressed and objective needs of defined groups of stakeholders may prove helpful for supporting decisions in landscape planning and management. In fact, they could be applied for highlighting landscape areas with different characteristics in terms of services provided. From this base, a suitability spatial assessment model (SUSAM) was developed and applied in a study area considering different verisimilar scenarios that policy makers could analyse. Each scenario is based on the prioritization of a set of services considering a defined group of stakeholders. Consistent and comparable ES and US indices of spatial benefiting areas (SBA) of services were calculated using GIS spatialization techniques. These indices were aggregated hierarchically with the relevance of services according to a spatial multicriteria decision analysis (S-MCDA). Results include maps for each scenario showing detailed spatial indices of suitability that integrate the local availability of SBA of ES and US, along with their relevance. The results were compared with known landscape classes identified in previous studies, which made it possible to interpret the spatial variation of suitability in the light of known landscape features. A complete sensitivity analysis was performed to test the sensitiveness of the model’s outputs to variations of judgements and their resistance to the indicators’ variation. The application of the model demonstrated its effectiveness in a landscape suitability assessment. At the same time, the sensitivity analysis and helping to understand the model behaviour in the different landscape classes also suggested possible solutions for simplifying the whole methodology.

Highlights

Ecosystem services (ES), the benefits that people obtain from ecosystems [1], have been broadly explored by the recent scientific literature, based on the idea that including this approach in policy making could support the development of instruments for increasing the global sustainability of the human activities [2]
Scenarios under changing service weights in the different landscape classes. These results show clearly that the effect of the weights’ increase with inverse proportionality to the weight increment both in supply-based and demand-based suitability index
This evidence means that weights have a slight influence on suitability, while the services’ ranking influences the results strongly, as the diversity of trends shown by the different cases shows

Summary

Introduction

Ecosystem services (ES), the benefits that people obtain from ecosystems [1], have been broadly explored by the recent scientific literature, based on the idea that including this approach in policy making could support the development of instruments for increasing the global sustainability of the human activities [2]. ES were classified in “final” and “intermediate,” highlighting that the final services are the services that tangibly benefit the final stakeholder, while the intermediate services are only functional to the production of the former [7,8]. This concept helps apply the ES approach into practice because it helps to focus only on a group of services, simplifying the decision model and avoiding the risk of double-counting some services. The service benefiting areas and the use region have to coincide, since citizens can only use the service if directly provided in the use region (such as electric energy for housing) [12]

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion