As a core and long-established part of urban blue–green infrastructure (BGI), public parks play a significant role in the sustainable development of cities. In particular, they make a major contribution to maintaining healthy ecosystems and providing multiple benefits that support human health and quality of life as a kind of nature-based solution (NBS). Still, planning, design, and management of public parks mostly rely on official standards and technical guidelines, whereas societal perspectives and the use of the ecosystem services (ES) approach (and cultural ecosystem services (CES) in particular) remain inadequately integrated. By assessing CES offered by Gorky Park in Moscow (Russia), the paper aims to bridge this gap and investigate the flow of CES and its relation to park infrastructure and the visitors’ needs. For this purpose, non-participant observation, field notes, and photographs were used in different functional park zones. By investigating visitor activities and factors affecting them, a variety of CES provided by the park have been detected. As aligned with its original idea, the park was mostly used for recreation, leisure, sports, and socializing. Moreover, the CES related to aesthetic, educational, and cultural heritage values were also partially utilized. The park was mostly attractive to the younger generation (the highest number of visitors), whereas visitors over 60 years old were hardly represented. Notably, men were more interested in sports (especially, team sports), whereas women mostly preferred walking (alone, with family, and with friends), relaxation, playing and spending time with children, picnicking, etc., which indicated certain preferences for CES among the park visitors. An interdependent relationship between the CES supply and the park infrastructure was found: the more infrastructural components were identified, the greater variety of park activities and corresponding CES were detected at certain observation points, which could ultimately lead to overcrowding and overutilization of the ES capacity. Given that the Moscow government claims integrating ES into the planning and management of urban BGI as one of the priorities in the city’s environmental policies, the related recommendations are provided. They address the recent challenges of creating integrated BGI, increasing demand for multifunctionality, and the conflicting interests of different visitor groups to maximize the benefits and diversity of CES delivered by the park.

Research on urban ecosystem services (ES) covers many regions globally, yet significant gaps remain in several areas, including Russia. Furthermore, the number of publications on Russian ES is still very low, and most of them focus on ES assessment on the national level which results in an incomplete understanding of ES provision in Russian cities. To fill this gap, 197 publications on urban ES have been systematically reviewed. Those mostly included research on urban ES in Russia as well as in other cities of the world that represented case studies within international collaborations of Russian scientists with other partners. The paper presents the main aspects of the ES concept adoption and operationalizing in the Russian scientific discourse, by providing an overview of the current research on the relationships between humans and urban ecosystems. Spatially, the majority of studies focused on large cities; herewith field surveys, statistical analysis, expert evaluations, and mapping were often used as the main research methods. Four key challenge areas have been revealed: anthropogenic pressure on soils and vegetation, urban green spaces (UGS) and their quantity and quality for ES provision, the value of ES assessment for urban planning, and payments for ES. To address these challenges, future research should focus on the role of urban ES for city resilience and sustainability, ecosystem disservices, rural–urban interactions, broader testing and validation of ES mapping and assessment as well as better integration of ES in economic, regulatory and compensation mechanisms.

Ecosystem services (ES) evaluation is essential for sustainable urban development. The article presents the results of a study aimed at determining the features of ES inclusion to urban planning and management of urban green spaces in Russia. For this purpose, a series of 30 interviews with experts from several cities of Russia (Moscow, St. Petersburg, Apatity, Rostov-on-Don, etc.) representing various professional areas (public administration, urban planning, landscape engineering, science, public organizations, etc.) was conducted. The results show that ES of urban blue-green infrastructure are not sufficiently reflected in decision-making practices and processes. They are not included in strategic urban planning, as well as in landscape and urban development projects. At the same time, the scientific community has obvious problems in resolving a large block of disagreements related to the lack of a common terminology, typologies, and methods for assessing ES. Experts understand the potential of integrating ES in decision-making and form a request for the development of methodological materials and the implementation of tools and approaches. During the study, a list of proposals on possible ways to include the ES in the practical activities of the professional community and in the management of urban green spaces was formed. The study was supported by the Russian Scientific Foundation (project No. 19-77-30012). The authors express their sincere gratitude and appreciation to the experts who participated in the interviews