Abstract
Most sustainable planning frameworks assess natural and social–economic landscape systems as separate entities, and our understanding of the interrelationships between them is incomplete. Landscape classification in urbanizing environments requires an integrated spatial planning approach to better address the United Nation’s sustainable development challenges. The objective of this research is to apply a multicriteria evaluation which ranked diverse ecosystem–service producing landscapes and synthesize the findings within a unique green infrastructure spatial planning framework. Local government stakeholder derived weighting and GIS classification were operated to map both the urban and natural landscapes of the Salt Lake City region of Utah, one of the most rapidly urbanizing areas in North America. Results were assimilated through five regional landscape typologies—Ecological, Hydrological, Recreational, Working Lands, and Community—and indicated those highest ranked landscape areas which provided multiple ecosystem services. These findings support collaborative decision making among diverse stakeholders with overlapping objectives and illustrates pathways to the development of ecosystem service criteria. This paper contributes to a better understanding of how to integrate data and visualize the strategic approaches required for sustainable planning and management, particularly in urban and urbanizing regions where complex socioecological landscapes predominate.
Highlights
Urban landscapes are social–ecological systems [1] and occur across much of the world [2]
The simple statistic results are presented overall and specific to each landscape typology, for clarity, in the last rows of Scheme 2. These rows summarize the specific ecosystem services totals associated to the landscape typologies
When the total landscape typology weighting was divided by this total value, normalized values were produced
Summary
Urban landscapes are social–ecological systems [1] and occur across much of the world [2]. Urban landscapes have high spatial heterogeneity [6] as well as demographic and social diversity, impacting resource access and function [7]. The ecosystem services (ES) framework assesses ecosystem benefits by translating ecological structures, functions, and processes into value based operations and objects [8]. Many models and theoretical constructs within ecosystem services exist, most are predominately ecological frameworks or anthropocentric frameworks [10]. Most ecosystem services frameworks evaluate single function landscapes [11], not multifunctionality nor the wider range of ecosystem services available [12,13]. Ecosystem services originate from multiple and diverse biophysical, social, economic, political, and cultural landscape features that fluctuate with spatial scale [14].
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