Palliwoda, J., and J. A. Priess. 2021. What do people value in urban green? Linking characteristics of urban green spaces to users’ perceptions of nature benefits, disturbances, and disservices. Ecology and Society 26(1):28. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-12204-260128

Context: The pressure on remaining open spaces of urban green infrastructure (UGI) is high due to increasing urbanization and the multiple requirements of a diverse urban population. Thus, a good quality and high capacity for ecosystem services of UGI is crucial to support a good quality of life. Objectives: This study analyses the influence of tree cover and other green parameters like species richness on ecosystem service use in urban parks and green brownfields. The outcomes contribute to design and management of resilient UGI. Methods: We assessed the diversity of woody and herbaceous flowering species in 36 study sites with low, medium and high tree cover in the city of Leipzig, Germany. UGI users were counted, and randomly selected visitors (n = 1750) were interviewed about their use of ecosystem services. Results: We found tree cover in urban parks negatively influencing physical interactions used by respondents. In parks with high tree cover, more respondents were benefitting from regulating services such as noise mediation or shade provision. Brownfield visitors preferred sites with low to medium tree cover, mainly for walking the dog but also for other ecosystem services. Plant species richness did not show significant influence. Conclusions: Tree cover in parks and brownfields can be a predictor for a range of ecosystem services typically used by visitors, highlighting how vegetation or green structures in UGI can be employed to steer the use. Brownfields provide additional space for complementary ecosystem service use, thus contributing to the avoidance of potential use conflicts in managed UGI like parks.

While held to be a means for climate change adaptation and mitigation, nature-based solutions (NbS) themselves are vulnerable to climate change. To find ways of compensating for this vulnerability we combine a focused literature review on how information technology has been used to strengthen positive social–ecological–technological feedback, with the development of a prototype decision-support tool. Guided by the literature review, the tool integrates recent advances in using globally available remote sensing data to elicit information on functional diversity and ecosystem service provisioning with information on human service demand and population vulnerability. When combined, these variables can inform climate change adaptation strategies grounded in local social–ecological realities. This type of integrated monitoring and packaging information to be actionable have potential to support NbS management and local knowledge building for context-tailored solutions to societal challenges in urban environments.

With increasing urbanisation, urban green spaces are expected to be crucial for urban resilience and sustainability, through the delivery of ecological, economic and social benefits. In practice, however, planning, management and evaluation of urban green spaces are rarely structured and evidence-based. This represents a missed opportunity to account for, track and foster the multiple benefits that green spaces are expected to deliver. To gain insight into this gap, this study assesses the availability and uptake of relevant evidence by city governments. Interviews, focus groups and quantitative surveys were applied in four medium-sized European cities: Coimbra (Portugal), Genk (Belgium), Leipzig (Germany), and Vilnius (Lithuania), covering the main governance and climatic gradients in Europe. Using straightforward data exploration and regression, we analyse which ecological, economic and social indicators are typically chosen by cities and why. Together with the city stakeholders, we derived a common set of benefit categories and key performance indicators which can be adapted to diverse local contexts. We conclude that cities tend to make pragmatic decisions when composing their indicator sets, but nevertheless cover multiple urban green space dimensions. Finally, we explore how indicator choice could be optimised towards a complementary and credible indicator set, taking into account a realistically feasible monitoring effort undertaken by the cities.

Conservation efforts are increasingly supported by ecosystem service assessments. These assessments depend on complex multi-disciplinary methods, and rely on a number of assumptions which reduce complexity. If assumptions are ambiguous or inadequate, misconceptions and misinterpretations may arise when interpreting results of assessments. An interdisciplinary understanding of assumptions in ecosystem service science is needed to provide consistent conservation recommendations. Here, we synthesise and elaborate on 12 prevalent types of assumptions in ecosystem service assessments. These comprise conceptual and ethical foundations of the ecosystem service concept, assumptions on data collection, indication, mapping, and modelling, on socio-economic valuation and value aggregation, as well as about using assessment results for decision-making. We recommend future assessments to increase transparency about assumptions, and to test and validate them and their potential consequences on assessment reliability. This will support the taking up of assessment results in conservation science, policy and practice.

The majority of Europeans live in cities, where parks as components of Urban Green Spaces (UGSs) play an important role in well-being and the provision of ecosystem services (ES). UGSs are especially relevant for the implementation of the United Nations (UN) Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals “Good health and wellbeing” (Goal 3) and “Sustainable cities and communities” (Goal 11). This study focused on ES use and users’ motives, which were surveyed during visits at central parks in the cities Leipzig, Coimbra and Vilnius. Park visitors used 17 different ES, dominated by physical interactions such as walking or biking, followed by experiential and aesthetical ES and ES linked to social relations. Age of visitors, cultural setting and distance to homes influenced ES use in the parks differently in each city, limiting the transferability of park—user behaviour or motivations across different spatial and cultural contexts. Results also indicate that aligning sustainability objectives and usability, good accessibility of urban parks plays a central role and encourages the use of non-motorized or public transport for park visits. Concrete information about UGS user motivation and behaviour generated in this and similar studies contributes to convert the UN Agenda 2030 strategies at the municipal level into sustainability and user-oriented design and management of UGS.