Understanding land use change impacts on ecosystem services within urban protected areas

Abstract

Protected Areas (PAs) aim at safeguarding biodiversity and cultural values by regulating land use and land cover (LULC) within their boundaries. In the context of different PAs categories, urban planners have the challenge of temporally and spatially understand ecosystem services (ES) supply and demand. To shed light on this issue, we explored ES within two levels of PAs in one of the main cities in a large tropical forest. By analyzing LULC and mapping ES in sustainable use and full protection PAs in São Paulo (Brazil), we investigated the impacts on ES supply and demand resulting from 28 years of LULC changes. In the sustainable use area, we identified urban expansion and the increased pressure on urban parks. In contrast, full protection PAs blocked the urbanization resulted from major undertakings and blocked the urban sprawl to parts of the sustainable use area. We found possible trade-offs between water provision (positively affected) and tourism (negatively affected) in response to the loss of pasture and between water provision (negatively affected) and local climate regulation, and tourism (positively affected) associated with the increase in agriculture. Our study reveals that conservation targets for PAs decisions should address trade-offs among ES as a result of LULC changes derived from surrounding projects and associated interventions.