Abstract

The urban ecosystem provides many services that help humans lead physically and mentally healthy lives. The quality of such urban ecosystem services is closely related to various urban forms, such as land cover, land use, buildings, infrastructure, population, and type and scale of green space. This study aims to promote the overall improvement and balance of an urban ecosystem’s regulating services. Initially, ecosystem regulating services are assessed according to the type of the urban space, and their contributions are analyzed based on linear regression slope and pairwise comparison of the ecosystem services. The contribution of ecosystem regulating services of Suwon City in South Korea was assessed through the following process: (1) selection of assessment indices and assessment methods for urban ecosystem regulating services; (2) urban space classification; (3) ecosystem regulating service assessment by type of urban space; and (4) pairwise comparison of ecosystem regulating services by type and for the entire study area. The study areas are classified into six type areas: forests (type A), agricultural land (type B), low-rise residential areas (type C), mid-rise mixed (residential and commercial) areas (type D), high-rise residential areas (type E), and industrial and barren land (type F). By studying representative regulating services, such as vegetation vitality, flood reduction capacity, carbon storage capacity, and heat reduction capacity, this study confirmed that type A provided the best service, while type C provided the worst. In addition, the relative contribution analysis between the regulating services based on pairwise comparison showed that the standard deviation between the contributions was 0.04 when diagnosing the entire study area, but apparently no types except type A were balanced. The reason such regulating services are imbalanced is that their vegetation vitality was calculated to be the lowest compared with the assessment indices of type A. Additionally, this imbalance was found to be most severe in the mid-rise mixed (residential and commercial) districts. Through this study, the spatial types in which the ecosystem regulating services in Suwon City are imbalanced could be determined. It was also revealed that regulating services should be prioritized for improvement in order to achieve greater balance in urban ecosystem. Such pairwise comparison results can be effectively utilized in determining the area and supply needed when formulating urban greening plans and forest restoration plans.

Highlights

  • This article is an open access articleIn urban areas, where more than half of the world’s population lives, an urban ecosystem is formed in which natural and artificial spaces are intricately connected, and urban residents depend on the services provided by the ecosystem [1]

  • The calculation results of the relative contributions obtained using the eigenvectors of the urban ecosystem regulating services (ERS) for each type are the same as those shown in Table 5 and Figure 6

  • Type A had the highest contribution in flood reduction, types B–E had the highest contribution in heat reduction, while type F had the highest contribution in carbon storage

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Summary

Introduction

In urban areas, where more than half of the world’s population lives, an urban ecosystem is formed in which natural and artificial spaces are intricately connected, and urban residents depend on the services provided by the ecosystem [1]. The ecosystem provides many services that help human beings lead physically and mentally healthy lives [2]. From nature and are mainly classified into supplying, regulating, supporting, and cultural services [2]. The quality of these urban ES is closely related to various urban forms, such as land cover, land use, buildings, infrastructure, population, location types, and scale of green areas [5,6,7,8,9]. Urban ecosystem components are more complex than those of natural ecosystems, even small changes can cause a chain reaction of imbalances in ES [10].

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