Green Infrastructure Management Research Articles

A Global Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Greenspaces on COVID-19 Infection and Mortality Rates.

The COVID-19 outbreak in 2020 resulted in rapidly rising infection rates with high associated mortality rates. In response, several epidemiological studies aimed to define ways in which the spread and severity of COVID-19 can be curbed. As a result, there is a steady increase in the evidence linking greenspaces and COVID-19 impact. However, the evidence of the benefits of greenspaces or greenness to human wellbeing in the context of COVID-19 is fragmented and sometimes contradictory. This calls for a meta-analysis of existing studies to clarify the matter. Here, we identified 621 studies across the world on the matter, which were then filtered down to 13 relevant studies for meta-analysis, covering Africa, Asia, Europe, and the USA. These studies were meta-analyzed, with the impacts of greenness on COVID-19 infection rate quantified using regression estimates whereas impacts on mortality rates were measured using mortality rate ratios. We found evidence of significant negative correlations between greenness and both COVID-19 infection and mortality rates. We further found that the impacts on COVID-19 infection and related mortality are moderated by year of publication, greenness metrics, sample size, health and political covariates. This clarification has far-reaching implications for policy development toward the establishment and management of green infrastructure for the benefit of human wellbeing.

CONCEPT FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF A GREEN URBAN ECOSYSTEM: MAIN THEORETICAL APPROACHES

The article reveals the basic theoretical approaches to the formation of a green urban ecosystem in the conditions of modern urbanization. The importance of ecological planning in cities and the impact of green spaces on improving the urban environment are substantiated. The necessity of introducing new methods of managing urban ecosystems, taking into account modern environmental challenges, has been established. Based on the set goal, modern approaches to planning and management of green infrastructure are considered. It is argued that the integration of natural components into urban structures is a key prerequisite for the sustainable development of urban areas. The main principles of creation and maintenance of the urban ecosystem were studied, in particular in the context of adaptation to climate change. The main trends in the development of green spaces in cities have been determined. Further perspectives of research should be directed to the integration of innovative solutions to improve the ecological condition of urban areas. The article also discusses the concept of urban ecosystems and what functions they perform. The latest scientific studies on the growing interest in the problems of green infrastructure development in cities were analyzed. Fifteen principles of green urbanism are analyzed in detail and examples of how they are implemented in some countries of the European Union are given. It is proved that the implementation of the concept of "green" economy is possible only if state mechanisms are introduced to encourage investment in environmentally safe production. Attention is focused on the need to change the methods and forms of fiscal policy at the government level, adopt appropriate laws and regulations, radically reform the policy of subsidizing and supporting renewable energy sources, and further increase investment in the "green" sectors of the economy. It is shown that the development and implementation of the concept of "green" economy in Ukraine should be considered as the main reference point and the basis of state policy. To improve environmental safety in the capital, it is necessary to consistently implement a range of organizational, technical, innovative and other environmental measures with mandatory definition of the social optimum of environmental quality, which will be accompanied by increasing environmental costs and significantly increasing society's requirements for economical use.

GREEN INFRASTRUCTURE OBJECTS ACCOUNTING OF URBOECOSYSTEMS: METHODOLOGICAL AND APPLIED ASPECTS

Introduction. The need to improve and develop methodical approaches to the accounting of green infrastructure objects is due to the lack of a unified system for determining the green infrastructure objects status of municipal territorial communities; the high dynamism of changes in the quality of the urbanized environment natural components and the economic conditions of society's existence; insufficiently regulated spatial development of cities and intra-system zoning and zoning of cities; lack of an ecosystem approach to the procedure of green infrastructure objects assessment and accounting.
 The purpose of the article: to justify the need in determine the green infrastructure objects status of urboecosystems, generalize methodical approaches to the accounting of such objects and develop proposals for their improvement.
 Results. The article substantiates the necessity of determining the green infrastructure objects status in municipal territorial communities, improving and developing methodical approaches to their accounting. The institutional prerequisites for the green infrastructure objects accounting of urban ecosystems, the tools of quantitative and quantitative-qualitative accounting of green spaces (interactive maps and plans, GIS accounting, mapping methods) that have gained practical application are considered. International approaches to the accounting of green infrastructure objects of urban ecosystems are analyzed. Current approaches that can be used for the identification of green infrastructure objects, their inventory, and certification have been identified, which allows us to assert the feasibility of considering green infrastructure as natural assets of the urban economy with all the prerequisites and consequences, namely, reflection in the General Development Plans, development strategies, plans and projects, accounting on the accounts of municipalities, distribution of responsibility for creation, operation, restoration, etc., which will be directly reflected in the green infrastructure management system. Proposals have been developed to fill in the criteria for quantitative and qualitative accounting of green spaces, which must be included in inventory lists, registers and passports of green infrastructure objects. As well as value indicators: book value, restoration value, improvement value, value increase, depreciation of green infrastructure objects. The experience of accounting implementation for the value indicators of green infrastructure objects ecosystem services is substantiated, since ecosystem capital is no less important than financial capital, and over time it will become the basis of the national wealth of the world countries.
 Conclusions. The green infrastructure formation is one of the strategic directions of the green course principles implementation in urban planning, and the accounting system of green infrastructure objects is an institutional environment element of the green cities functioning, information support for making management decisions that will contribute to the natural resources protection of urban ecosystems, and the quality improvement of the city`s residents living environment.

Comparison of Ecosystem Services and Replacement Value calculations performed for urban trees

Trees provide ecosystem services such as improvements to air and water quality, landscaping, and thermal comfort, energy conservation or carbon sequestration. To find a financial value to urban trees, an assessment of 1,099 trees in Warsaw, Poland, was performed based on the Ecosystem Services (ES) in I-Tree Eco and the Replacement Value (RV) Calculations. An indicator, the Degree of Duplication (DDC), was proposed to compare two different tree evaluation methods. We measured trees growing nearby streets, at multi-family residential areas and park trees. In the park zone, according to the trunk formula method, we identified the Ecosystem Services provided by trees as the most effective: $25/one tree and the highest tree Replacement Value ($6,089/one tree). The results confirm that good tree vitality is essential for achieving maximum levels of Ecosystem Services. We propose to combine both approaches (RV and ES) to improve green infrastructure management effectively.

Natural Regeneration and Conservation Status of the Tree Community of Forest Remnants in Urban Parks in Southern Brazil

Purpose: The study characterised the dynamics of the natural regeneration process of urban remnants in four Curitiba (PR, Brazil) urban parks, aiming to contribute to the green infrastructure management process in Araucaria Forest areas. Theoretical framework: Urban forests offer significant socio-environmental benefits, being relevant for maintaining ecosystem services for cities and their inhabitants. Studying the regeneration of forest remnants in urban environments is essential for analysing their conservation status. Method/design/approach: The floristic diversity, structure, and population dynamics of the shrub-regenerating component of urban forest remnants were studied through the analysis of phytosociological parameters and the similarity between the shrub-regenerating, and arboreal components was verified. Results and conclusion: Significant dissimilarity was found between the study areas' regenerating shrub and tree components. The forest remnant of the Municipal Zoo, located in a locality with greater integration of different green areas, showed the best conservation status and a more advanced process of forest succession. Research implications: The analysis of the natural regeneration of urban remnants serves as an essential diagnosis regarding their conservation status and the capacity of species to perpetuate in the place, in addition to inferring about the connectivity with other urban remnants, being of great importance for the planning of actions aimed at the management of urban forests. Originality value: Analyzing natural regeneration generates information on forest remnants' conservation status and resilience, which is essential for planning actions for urban forest management.

Exploring Public Preference and Willingness to Pay for the Ecosystem Benefits of Urban Green Infrastructure: Evidence from a Discrete Choice Experiment of Pilot Sponge Cities in China

Global extreme weather events such as rainstorms, floods and droughts have become increasingly frequent, posing significant threats to human beings worldwide. Green infrastructure has been implemented for decades to mitigate these issues. However, its widespread adoption in cities is still limited. A lack of sustainable funds was viewed as a great challenge for its widespread implementation. Many developed countries have practiced public participation and stormwater fee systems to mitigate these challenges. To assess the value that citizens place on the ecosystem benefits provided by urban green infrastructure is of great importance for increasing public participation and their willingness to pay. Thus, this paper aims to explore public preferences and their willingness to pay for the benefits of green infrastructure to support the construction and maintenance costs. A discrete choice experiment method was employed and five attributes were selected: reduction in run-off pollutant, degrees of ponding, plant type, planting aesthetics and the amount of payment. The Ngene1.2 software was used to generate a questionnaire, and data collected from the case cities, Xianyang and Xi’xian New Area, China, were analyzed using the mixed logit model. The results revealed that in Xianyang, the willingness to pay was not significantly associated with cognition, while in Xi’xian New Area, willingness to pay was positively related to cognition. Respondents exhibited a significant willingness to pay for green infrastructure to achieve reduced degrees of ponding in both cities, as well as improving planting aesthetics in Xi’xian New Area. Based on these findings, we conclude that government decision-makers should prioritize disseminating knowledge about green infrastructure to residents before implementing such projects in communities. The findings provide valuable insights into the potential economic value of urban green infrastructure and can guide policymakers and urban planners in making decisions regarding the design, implementation, and management of green infrastructure. This study contributes to the understanding of citizen perspectives and the economic evaluation of ecosystem services provided by urban green infrastructure.

Environmental Design for Urban Cooling, Access, and Safety: A Novel Approach to Auditing Outdoor Areas in Residential Aged Care Facilities

Strategies and guidelines for best practice environmental design typically have a singular focus and intended outcome, for example, green infrastructure management for urban cooling in a hotter climate. However, when applied to specific situations such as aged care, matters such as accessibility, wayfinding, and safety are also critical. Combining various audit tools offer multiple benefits to meet a variety of needs for thermal comfort, health, and well-being, as well as cost-effectiveness. In the absence of such a tool, using a place-based analysis, we developed a novel audit tool for external settings of residential aged care facilities (ACFs) incorporating urban cooling, Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED), and universal design criteria. To determine how ACFs perform in the face of increased levels of urban heat required evaluation of additional urban cooling measures. The Audit Tool was developed and tested in collaboration with ACFs across sub-tropical and tropical areas of Australia, varying in climate, scale, and urban density. Quality of life for residents, visitors, and staff of ACFs can be supported by the provision of green infrastructure to improve the thermal comfort of outdoor settings and, if located appropriately, reduce the need for an increase in internal air-conditioning. The aim of this article is to propose a user-friendly Hybrid Environmental Design Audit Tool (HEDAT) to support facility managers, planners, and design consultants to inform the prioritization and targeting of interventions and monitoring of implementation and outcomes.

City-wide, high-resolution mapping of evapotranspiration to guide climate-resilient planning

The impacts of global change, including extreme heat and water scarcity, are threatening an ever-growing urban world population. Evapotranspiration (ET) mitigates the urban heat island, reducing the effect of heat waves. It can also be used as a proxy for vegetation water use, making it a crucial tool to plan resilient green cities. To optimize the trade-off between urban greening and water security, reliable and up-to-date maps of ET for cities are urgently needed. Despite its importance, few studies have mapped urban ET accurately for an entire city in high spatial and temporal resolution. We mapped the ET of Berlin, Germany in high spatial (10-m) and temporal (hourly) resolution for the year of 2019. A novel machine learning (ML) approach combining Sentinel-2 time series, open geodata, and flux footprint modeling was applied. Two eddy flux towers with contrasting surrounding land cover provided the training and testing data. Flux footprint modeling allowed us to incorporate comprehensive land cover types in training the ML models. Open remote sensing and geodata used as model inputs included Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) from Sentinel-2, building height, impervious surface fraction, vegetation fraction, and vegetation height. NDVI was used to indicate vegetation phenology and health, as plant transpiration contributes to the majority of terrestrial ET. Hourly reference ET (RET) was calculated and used as input to capture the temporal dynamics of the meteorological conditions. Predictions were carried out using Random Forest (RF) regression. Weighted averages extracted from hourly ET maps using flux footprints were compared to measured ET from the two flux towers. Validation showed that the approach is reliable for mapping urban ET, with a mean R2 of 0.76 and 0.56 and a mean RMSE of 0.0289 mm and 0.0171 mm at the more vegetated site and the city-center site, respectively. Lastly, the variation of ET between Local Climate Zones (LCZs) was analyzed to support urban planning. This study demonstrated the capacity to map urban ET at an unprecedented high spatial and temporal resolution with a novel methodology, which can be used to support the sustainable management of green infrastructure and water resources in an urbanizing world facing climate change.

Soil microarthropod distribution on the urban–rural gradient of Riga city: a study with robust sampling method application

AbstractTo address the new challenge of bringing more nature into the urban environment and developing adequate green infrastructure management methods, it is necessary to clarify the regularities of the distribution of the main ecosystem components—soil organism communities on the urban gradient. Microarthropods—collembolans and mites—are the most diverse soil animals and bioindicators of soil conditions. However, no suitable approaches exist so far to help reduce the high workload of soil zoological studies and make the data acquisition for soil assessment faster. To get closer to a solution to this problem, we propose a robust sampling approach using one pooled sample per site with surface area 58 cm2. This was tested in a microarthropod distribution study on the urban gradient of Riga city (Latvia) in six urban habitat types at 21 sites. The use of classical statistical methods for the processing of soil microarthropod data is limited because these data do not meet model requirements on which classical methods are based, first of all, conformity to the normal distribution. These problems are circumvented by bootstrapping methodology, which thanks to increasing computer performance now is implemented in the most modern program packages. We tested a set of such methods: one-way bootstrap-based analysis of variance, nonmetric multidimensional scaling (NMS), nonparametric multiplicative regression (NPMR), multi-response permutation procedure and Chao bootstrap-based rarefaction curves. NMS in combination with NPMR gave the best results providing statistically significant species distribution curves along the urban gradient which were broadly in line with species traits found by other studies.

ЗАСТОСУВАННЯ КРАЩИХ СВІТОВИХ ПРАКТИК УПРАВЛІННЯ ПРИРОДНИМИ АКТИВАМИ В ПОВОЄННОМУ УКРАЇНСЬКОМУ ПРИЧОРНОМОР’Ї

The article substantiates the possibilities of applying the world’s best practices in the natural asset management in the post-war Ukrainian Black Sea region. Municipal natural assets are defined as the main object of management – objectively the most demanded in world practice; the specifics of the municipal natural asset management are close to the conditions of post-war Ukraine: the financing crisis, the destruction / wear and tear of communal infrastructure facilities, the imperfection of management processes and procedures, the inertia of the accounting system. In the context of understanding the ecological situation in the pre-war Ukrainian Black Sea region, it was determined that, compared to other countries with access to the Black Sea, Ukraine: in terms of renewable energy consumption, % of total final energy consumption, as of 2019, with an indicator of 7.44%, is inferior to all other countries, in particular Romania (23.54%); according to the indicator of renewable domestic fresh water resources, m3 per capita, as of 2018, with an indicator of 1,234.80, Ukraine is significantly inferior to all other countries, in particular, Georgia (15,598.88) and Turkey (2,756.86). A brief description of the destruction and pollution of the Ukrainian coastal regions as a result of the war of the russia against Ukraine was made. In particular, as of November 2022, only on the territory of the Donetsk region – large losses among the civilian population; destroyed: schools – 449, roads – 2695.2 km, hospitals – 176, residential area – 17.324 million m2. The recommendations for the inclusion of natural assets in financial planning are proposed: primarily regarding the preliminary development of an asset management strategy as a systematic business process for making decisions regarding municipal assets throughout their entire life cycle; having financial plans to ensure the repair and replacement of assets at the appropriate time, with appropriate accounting, including depreciation of assets in financial statements; combining the traditional approach of the integrated management of natural assets and the innovative approach to the municipal green infrastructure management.

Assessment of the allelopathic potential of some naturalized tree and shrubby introducents under conditions of the northern steppe Dnieper region

Nowadays, introduced alien tree and shrubby species have become integral components of the green infrastructure in cities and suburban artificial forest plantations around the world, and their participation in regional dendroflora is steadily increasing. Along with autochthonous species, tree and shrubby introducents perform a wide range of ecological functions and ecosystem services, but, with successful naturalization and increased invasive activity, they can cause negative biological, environmental, social, and economic consequences. The potential for the evolution of adventive species in secondary habitats in the direction of increasing allelopathic activity and competitiveness compared with native species determines the need for assessment of allelopathic potential as a possible predictor of their successful invasive activity. The allelopathic activity of the species was determined by the bioassay method based on the effect of water extracts of different concentrations obtained from dry biomass of leaves on the germination of testing culture seeds of Raphanus raphanistrum subsp. sativus (L.) Domin and biometric indicators of seedlings of Lepidium sativum L. It was determined that in the conditions of the northern steppe Dnieper region, naturalized tree and shrubby introducents Celtis occidentalis L., Morus alba L., Lonicera tatarica L., Mahonia aquifolium (Pursh) Nutt., Prunus virginiana L., Prunus serotina Ehrh., Rhus typhina L. have significant allelopathic potential, which can be a predictor of increasing their competitiveness compared with native species and increasing invasive activity within the region. Water extracts from dry leaves of the studied tree and shrubby species had an inhibitory effect on seed germination and biometric indicators of testing cultures seedlings; the intensity of this effect varied depending on the plant species and extract concentration. Assessment of the allelopathic potential of the alien tree and shrubby species used in urban and suburban green planting is a necessary measure for preliminary identification of potentially invasive species, which will contribute to the increase of efficiency of green infrastructure management.

Research on Green Infrastructure of Sustainable Built Environment

Over the past few decades, the phenomenon of climate change has raised a global concern. The majority tend to see urbanization as a primary cause for it. Due to the vegetated surfaces decrease continually with the hard surface expanding such as pavement and concrete rooftops, the problems of heat island effect and increased surface runoff have become increasing serious. In order to mitigate these climatic issues, the green infrastructure should play a constructive role becomes as it provides essential services for communities. This network connecting with nature is able to deal with the climatic and urban challenges we facing today. This paper will explore the important role that the green infrastructure can play in sustainable built environment. The green infrastructure management as a strategy to alleviate the issues caused by urbanization will be discussed. The case in Seattle will be analyzed and evaluated because this city is one of the pioneers in the GI field. Some recommendation and conclusion will be given at the end.

Combining catastrophe technique and regression analysis to deduce leading landscape patterns for regional flood vulnerability: A case study of Nanjing, China

Urbanization leads to changes in land use, and the expansion of impervious surfaces leads to an increase in flood vulnerability. Predicting and analyzing these landscape pattern changes are important in the early stages of urban planning. In practice, the threshold for obtaining comprehensive and detailed hydrological and meteorological data is high, which makes it difficult for landscape and urban planners to quickly evaluate urban floods. To compensate for these trends, we took Nanjing, China, as the study site and discussed the leading flood vulnerability landscape patterns based on quantitative assessments. We introduced catastrophe theory to integrate three indicators and seven subfactors for flood vulnerability assessment: exposure, including precipitation; sensitivity, including elevation, slope, soil and drainage density; and adaptability, including land use and forest coverage. Then, we calculated the landscape pattern metrics (shape index, fractal dimension index, related circumscribing circle, contiguity index and landscape division index) at the class level. Finally, we divided the city into four subregions, established regression models for the subregions and the whole city, and deduced the leading flood vulnerability landscape patterns in each region and the whole city. We found that the leading landscape patterns varied among different regions. According to the research results, the landscape pattern indexes identified in this paper can be interpreted intuitively, which can provide a reference for modifying the planning layout of regional green infrastructure, optimizing the vulnerability of urban floods, and providing a basis for further improving Nanjing urban planning and alleviating the urban flood vulnerability. The methods proposed herein also will benefit land use and green infrastructure management in other regions lacking meteorological and hydrological data.

Scenario Analysis for Resilient Urban Green Infrastructure

With the advancement of urbanization, the stress on the green infrastructure around the urban agglomeration has intensified, which causes severe ecological problems. The uncertainty of urban growth makes it difficult to achieve effective protection only by setting protection red lines and other rigid measures. It is of practical significance to optimize the resilience of the stressed green infrastructure. To this end, we explore a scenario simulation analysis method for the resilience management of green infrastructure under stress. This research applies artificial neural network cellular automata to simulate the impacts of the Chang-Zhu-Tan urban agglomeration expansion on the green infrastructure in 2030 in three scenarios: no planning control, urban planning control, and ecological protection planning control. Based on the analysis, we identify four green infrastructure areas under stress and formulate resilience management measures, respectively. The results show that: (1) The distribution pattern of green infrastructure under stress is different in three scenarios. Even in the scenario of ecological protection planning and control, urban growth can easily break through the ecological protection boundary; (2) Residential, industrial, and traffic facility land are the main types of urban land causing green infrastructure stress, while forest, shrub, and wetland are the main types of the stressed green infrastructure; (3) Efficient protection of green infrastructure and the management of the urban growth boundary should be promoted by resilient management measures such as urban planning adjustment, regulatory detailed planning, development strength control and setting up the ecological protection facilities for the stressed green infrastructure areas of the planning scenarios and the no-planning control scenarios, for the areas to be occupied by urban land, and for the important ecological corridors. The results of this study provide an empirical foundation for formulating policies and the methods of this study can be applied to urban ecological planning and green infrastructure management practice in other areas as well.

Examining who benefited from green infrastructure during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020: Considering the issues of access to green areas from socioeconomic and environmental perspectives

Access to green areas was one of the most contested issues during Japan's first coronavirus emergency period in 2020. The access was examined using a large-scale online questionnaire survey. An integrated analysis of socioeconomic attributes and environmental factors was conducted, and a typology of respondents, in terms of being beneficiaries of green infrastructure, was provided. Based on empirical datasets, we identified: (1) a relatively strong influence of the pandemic on the access to green areas for young females, both positively and negatively, (2) difficulties of green area access for unmarried low-income respondents in terms of aspects such as travel time, and (3) the influence of neighboring environments on green area access; for example, if there were agricultural lands near the respondents' residential areas, they tended to visit those lands instead of other green areas. The identified typology can serve as a basis for policy targets or components within policy, to enhance the management of green infrastructure as “open” and public areas. This analysis method can be applied to different regions globally, and it contributes to policymaking for green area management to enhance social and individual well-being.

Effects of Climate and Drought on Stem Diameter Growth of Urban Tree Species

Urbanization and climate change are two inevitable megatrends of this century. Knowledge about the growth responses of urban trees to climate is of utmost importance towards future management of green infrastructure with the aim of a sustainable provision of the environmental ecosystem services. Using tree-ring records, this study analyzed growth response to climate by stem diameter at breast height (DBH) of 1178 trees in seven large cities worldwide, including Aesculus hippocastanum L. in Munich; Platanus × hispanica Münchh. in Paris; Quercus nigra L. in Houston; Quercus robur L. in Cape Town; Robinia pseudoacacia L. in Santiago de Chile, Munich, and Würzburg; and Tilia cordata Mill. in Berlin, Munich, and Würzburg. Climate was characterized following the de Martonne aridity index (DMI). Overall, trees showed an 8.3% lower DBH under arid than humid climate at the age of 100. Drought-tolerant tree species were overall not affected by climate. However, R. pseudoacacia showed a lower diameter when growing in semi-dry than humid climate. In contrast, drought-sensitive tree species were negatively affected by arid climate. Moreover, the effect of drought years on annual diameter increment was assessed. P. × hispanica and R. pseudoacacia appeared as the most drought-resistant species. The highest sensitivity to drought was detected in T. cordata and Q. robur. A. hippocastanum and Q. nigra showed a lower diameter growth during drought events, followed by a fast recovery. This study’s findings may contribute to a better understanding of urban tree growth reactions to climate, aiming for sustainable planning and management of urban trees.

Socio-Ecological Support and Physical Facilities Satisfaction: How They Link to Social Participation and Well-Being among Urban Residents in Malaysia

In urban communities, the threat to residents’ social well-being arises from their social lives; however, there is little evidence demonstrating how urban communities are connected with each other to improve their well-being. Therefore, the current study aims to identify the satisfaction levels with socio-ecological support and facilities received by selected urban residents in Malaysia. The study also examines the link between residents’ satisfaction and their social participation, as well as social well-being. This survey used a set of closed-ended questionnaires. A simple random sampling technique was employed, where a total number of 2502 respondents from six zones participated in this study. The collected data were analysed descriptively and inferentially. The results revealed that the majority of respondents are satisfied with socio-ecological and physical green facilities. Better green infrastructure management practice is required because the results from this study identified scientific issues in green environments in urban recreational centres, waste management, regular health maintenance, landscaping, and building maintenance. Results showed significant differences in the residents’ social well-being based on their socio-economic backgrounds. Results also demonstrated that social participation has significantly contributed to the social well-being of urban residents. These findings indicate the importance of various socio-ecological programmes to ensure a positive impact on the social well-being of the urban community. Overall, this study suggests implementing a comprehensive support mechanism for socio-ecological support initiatives to improve the social well-being of urban residents.

Biocultural diversity in an urban context: An indicator-based decision support tool to guide the planning and management of green infrastructure

Cities face growing challenges and urban greenspaces (UGS) play a key role in improving cities liveability. UGS are complex socio-ecological systems and evidence-based and context-sensitive tools are needed to assist planning and manage environmentally sound and socially inclusive UGS. In this paper, we propose an innovative indicator-based tool to operationalize the biocultural diversity (BCD) framework in urban contexts, deriving from its three conceptual layers – materialized, lived and stewardship. Indicators proposed are bundled in themes representing essential components when assessing and analyzing urban BCD from a contextual and sensitizing perspective. The set of indicators highlight key features of socio-cultural and ecological systems, theirs links and interactions, both material and non-material, to capture the essence of biocultural diversity at site-level. By offering a uniform scoring system with the possibility to set site-specific benchmarks, these can be used in any type of greenspace of any city, while allowing different communities/neighborhoods/city councils to embrace different approaches to meet their objectives towards larger scale goals. Twelve urban parks in Lisbon were used as a test-bed for the indicator-based tool and proved its feasibility to gather an overall snapshot of all parks and to demonstrate the possibility to deepen the study to only two parks uncovering self-exclusion processes that otherwise would have remained hidden. The BCD tool brings together essential information scattered over several quality and good practices assessment tools and protocols and, by including indicators specifically addressing governance and stewardship, offers a policy-driven instrument able to capture trade-offs and/or synergies between ecological, social and political domains.

Deep learning-based tree species mapping in a highly diverse tropical urban setting

Spatially explicit information on urban tree species distribution is crucial for green infrastructure management in cities. This information is usually acquired with ground-based surveys, which are time-consuming and usually cover limited spatial extents. The combination of machine learning algorithms and remote sensing images has been hailed as a promising way to map tree species over broad areas. Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs), a type of deep learning method, have achieved outstanding results for tree species discrimination in various remote sensing data types. However, there is a lack of studies using CNN-based methods to produce tree species composition maps, particularly for tropical urban settings. Here, we propose a multi-task CNN to map tree species in a highly diverse neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Our network architecture takes an aerial photograph (RGB bands and pixel size = 0.15 m) and delivers two outputs: a semantically segmented image and a distance map transform. In the former, all pixel positions are labeled, while in the latter, each pixel position contains the Euclidean distance to the crown boundary. We developed a post-processing approach that combines the two outputs, and we classified nine and five tree species with an average F1-score of 79.3 ± 8.6% and 87.6 ± 4.4%, respectively. Moreover, our post-processing approach produced a realistic tree species composition map by labeling only pixels of the target species with high class membership probabilities. Our results show the potential of CNNs and aerial photographs to map tree species in highly diverse tropical urban settings, providing valuable insights for urban forest management and green spaces planning.

Mecanismos Legales para la protección ambiental de los bosques urbanos en cuatro municipios de la Provincia de Buenos Aires

This paper is part of two research projects entitled «Development of tools for urban and peri-urban green infrastructure management in municipalities of Buenos Aires Province» and «Ecosystem services provided by water and urban forests at the Lujan river basin, in Argentina. Contributions from a social, legal and environmental approach» PICT 2019-00713. Urban Forests (UF) as a key component of urban green infrastructure could contribute to the sustainable development of cities to improve the population's quality of life. There are national regulations, such as the Forest Wealth Defense Law (13273), which could contemplate the UF one; buthowever, there is no law that specifically protects the fore mentioned infrastructures at this level. Buenos Aires Province unifies guidelines through the Public Tree Law (12276), delegating to municipalities.