Abstract
Sustainable management of a region’s critical and valued ecosystem resources requires an understanding about how these resource systems might function into the future. In urbanized areas, this requires the ability to frame the role of resources within the context of urban dynamics and the implications of policy and investment choices. In this paper we describe a three-step approach to assessing the impact of future urban development on ecosystem services: 1) characterize key ecosystem resources and services, 2) forecast future land-use changes, and 3) assess how future land-use changes will affect ecosystem services. Each of these steps can be carried out with different levels of sophistication and detail. All steps involve a combination of science and process: the science provides information that is deliberated upon by stakeholders in public forums before conclusions are drawn. We then illustrate the approach by describing how it was used in two regions in the state of Illinois in the United States. In the first instance, an early application of this approach, a simple overlay was used to identify development pressure on an environmentally sensitive river bluff; this finding altered thinking about public policy choices. In the second instance, the more fine-grained analysis was conducted for several ecosystem services.
Highlights
One hundred forty miles (225 km) due south of Chicago, the Champaign-Urbana metropolitan area hosts the University of Illinois—the state’s flagship public university—as well as a thriving healthcare industry, a burgeoning research park, and some of earth’s most fertile agricultural soil
In this paper we have described an approach—based on understanding the dynamics of urban systems—for assessing the implications of urban policy and investment decisions on the future delivery of ecosystem services
This engagement could facilitate a more complete assessment of negative or positive outcomes that are removed in time and space from those making the assessments; discounting these temporally and spatially distant outcomes leads to unsustainable choices [21]
Summary
One hundred forty miles (225 km) due south of Chicago, the Champaign-Urbana metropolitan area hosts the University of Illinois—the state’s flagship public university—as well as a thriving healthcare industry, a burgeoning research park, and some of earth’s most fertile agricultural soil. The Boneyard Creek is a small waterway that drains much of the University of Illinois campus, along with substantial portions of the urban areas in the adjacent cities of Champaign (to the west) and Urbana (to the east). It is a tributary of the Saline Branch of the Salt Fork Vermilion River to the east, which in turn, tributes the Vermilion and the Wabash River systems. Perhaps because the changes in imperviousness were not carefully accounted for, the new pipes had the unfortunate effect of creating flooding on the other side of the tracks where the western branch joined the main waterway This area was the main campus business district – Campustown. What about the future? How can we determine the effects that our evolving urban areas will have on valuable ecosystem services in the future? In our experience, this requires the following steps: 1) characterize key ecosystem resources and services, 2) forecast future land-use changes, and 3) assess how future land-use changes will affect ecosystem services and vice versa
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