Abstract
Understanding and explaining the use of green spaces and forests is challenging for sustainable urban planning. In recent years there has been increasing demand for novel approaches to investigate urban green infrastructure by capitalizing on large databases from existing citizen science tools. In this study, we analyzed iNaturalist data to perform an assessment of the intentional use of these urban spaces for their value and to understand the main drivers. We retrieved the total number of observations obtained across a set of 672 European cities and focused on reporting from mapped green areas and forests. We used two separate multivariate explanatory models to investigate which factors explained variations in the number of observations for green areas and forests. We found a relatively heterogeneous use of these two urban green spaces. Gross domestic product was important in explaining the number of visits. Availability and accessibility also had positive relationships with the use of green areas and forests in cities, respectively. This study paves the way for better integration of citizen science data in assessing cultural services provided by urban green infrastructure and therefore in supporting the evaluation of spatial planning policies for the sustainable development of urban areas.
Highlights
Citizens are an integral component of urban green infrastructure [1]
People are an important driver of the pattern-processes and dynamics of the urban landscape, and the role of civil society is increasingly emerging in support of sustainable planning and management practices [2,3,4,5]
Most of the preference-pattern assessments of urban green infrastructure are based on questionnaires and interviews that have been explicitly tailored to analyze the use of urban green areas and forests, as well as on personal scores attributed to visual images [11,12]
Summary
Citizens are an integral component of urban green infrastructure [1]. people are an important driver of the pattern-processes and dynamics of the urban landscape, and the role of civil society is increasingly emerging in support of sustainable planning and management practices [2,3,4,5]. Researchers have coped with these challenges by proposing a wide set of methodologies and concepts related to the recreational use of nature (e.g., ‘attractiveness’ [9] and ‘vitality’ [10]) In these studies, most of the preference-pattern assessments of urban green infrastructure are based on questionnaires and interviews that have been explicitly tailored to analyze the use of urban green areas and forests, as well as on personal scores attributed to visual images [11,12]. Most of the preference-pattern assessments of urban green infrastructure are based on questionnaires and interviews that have been explicitly tailored to analyze the use of urban green areas and forests, as well as on personal scores attributed to visual images [11,12] Employing such methods is a demanding and time-consuming process that hinders systematic and rapid assessments, especially when the scale of analysis is large [13,14]. Advances in investigating the perception and preference towards urban green infrastructure have greatly improved, direct measures to assess the use of these spaces are still scarce [9]
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