Assessing the Ecosystem Services of Various Types of Urban Green Spaces Based on i-Tree Eco

Peihao Song,Audrey Mayer,Ruizhen He,Gunwoo Kim,Guohang Tian

doi:10.3390/su12041630

Abstract

Urban green spaces play a crucial role in maintaining urban ecosystem sustainability by providing numerous ecosystem services. How to quantify and evaluate the ecological benefits and services of urban green spaces remains a hot topic currently, while the evaluation is barely applied or implemented in urban design and planning. In this study, super-high-resolution aerial images were used to acquire the spatial distribution of urban green spaces; a modified pre-stratified random sampling method was applied to obtain the vegetation information of the four types of urban green spaces in Luohe, a common plain city in China; and i-Tree Eco model was further used to assess the vegetation structure and various ecosystem services including air quality improvement, rainfall interception, carbon storage, and sequestration provided by four types of urban green spaces. The modeling results reveal that there were about 1,006,251 trees in this area. In 2013, all the trees in these green spaces could store about 54,329 t of carbon, sequester about 4973 t of gross carbon, remove 92 t of air pollutants, and avoid 122,637 m3 of runoff. The study illustrates an innovative method to reveal different types of urban green spaces with distinct ecosystem service productivity capacity to better understand their various roles in regulating the urban environment. The results could be used to assist urban planners and policymakers to optimize urban green space structure and composition to maximize ecosystem services provision.

Highlights

Urban green space, as an inseparable element of urban ecosystems, provides critical ecosystem services [1,2] for human wellbeing, like air quality improvement [3,4] through pollution removal and noise reduction, water and soil conservation [5], microclimate regulation [6,7], urban heat island (UHI) mitigation [8], biodiversity conservation [9,10], etc
The objective of this study is to reveal the difference in vegetation structure of the four types of urban green spaces, to highlight how the various types of urban green spaces perform in ecosystem service provisioning in Luohe, and to demonstrate how to increase and maximize the ecosystem services provisioning in the future
Different types of urban green spaces with various vegetation communities and functions result in different ecosystem services

Summary

Introduction

As an inseparable element of urban ecosystems, provides critical ecosystem services [1,2] for human wellbeing, like air quality improvement [3,4] through pollution removal and noise reduction, water and soil conservation [5], microclimate regulation [6,7], urban heat island (UHI) mitigation [8], biodiversity conservation [9,10], etc. Urban green spaces bring economic and social benefits [11,12], for instance, energy saving, promoting community integration [13], and outdoor recreation. Their potential contribution to citizens is being increasingly acknowledged. The capacity of various green spaces ecosystem services provision is context-specific and different depending on their type and size [31,32]. Various types of urban green spaces such as public parks, road belt green space, wetland, and private gardens are extremely heterogeneous with different vegetation communities and diversities reflecting diverse social needs and personal preferences that further influence eco-function value provision [33]

Objectives

Results

Conclusion