The provision of ecosystem services at the local scale along a rural-urban gradient : a case study of a typical UK metropolitan city
The process of urbanisation has resulted in the degradation of the ecosystem servicesprovided by the natural environment within cities. Conserving and enhancing theseecosystem services improves the sustainability of cities, and the health and wellbeing of thoseliving and working in urban areas. Although many methods exist to quantify ecosystemservices, these are based on placing economic value on an environmental commodity; atechnique which has been highly criticised.Previous studies on ecosystem services have generally focused at landscape andglobal scales, failing to appreciate the provision at local scales. The research reported in thisthesis focuses on the provision of nine ecosystem services of importance to urbanenvironments (aesthetic, recreation, spiritual, climate change adaptation and mitigation, airquality control, water flow regulation, biodiversity, pollination, and noise buffering services),and has created a new analytical tool to quantify them in non-economic terms at the localscale. The tool was applied to 69 sites of 0.25km2 along a rural-urban gradient within theGreater Manchester conurbation.The results revealed that not all the ecosystem services studied were positivelycorrelated with the amount of impermeable land cover as predicted from a consideration ofprevious studies. In addition, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was carried out toestablish which ecosystem services could exist together at high quality within any given site,and which would need to be traded off. PCA revealed two scenarios, accounting for 48% and^ 23% of events within sites of 0.25km .The outputs of this study could have applications within the planning process,allowing practitioners to focus on enhancing services which can exist synergistically within agiven site, thereby increasing the effectiveness of ecosystem service provision within urbanareas and benefiting the health and wellbeing of urban inhabitants.
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