An Approach to Evaluate Comprehensive Plan and Identify Priority Lands for Future Land Use Development to Conserve More Ecological Values

Abstract

Urbanization has significant impacts on the regional environmental quality through altering natural lands, converting them to urban built-up areas. One common strategy applied by urban planners to manage urbanization and preserve natural resources is to make a comprehensive plan and concentrate future land use in certain areas. However, in practice, planners used to make future land use planning mainly based on their subjective interpretations with limited ecological supporting evidence and analysis. Here, we propose a new approach composed of ecological modelling and land use zoning in the spatial matrix to evaluate the comprehensive plan and identify priority lands for sustainable land use planning. We use the city of Corvallis, OR, as the test bed to demonstrate this new approach. The results indicate that the Corvallis Comprehensive Plan 1998-2020 featured with compact development is not performing efficiently in conserving ecological values, and the land use plan featured with mixed-use spreading development generated by the proposed approach meets the city's land demands for urban growth, and conserves 103% more ecological value of retaining storm water nitrogen, 270% more ecological value of retaining storm water phosphorus and 19% more ecological value in storing carbon in the whole watershed. This study indicates that if planned with scientific analysis and evidence, spreading urban development does not necessarily result in less sustainable urban environment than the compact development recommended in smart growth.

Correlations of Stormwater Runoff and Quality: Urban Pavement and Property Value by Land Use at the Parcel Level in a Small Sized American City

“…The InVEST model and its associated biophysical dataset were developed and calibrated by the Natural Capital Project in the Willamette Valley area within which Corvallis is located [17] and has been applied successfully in the other coastal areas in Western North America in previous studies [18,45,46]. This research uses the stormwater runoff yield and purification models and the biophysical data built in InVEST at 1 m × 1 m pixel resolution and combines the results at the parcel level.…”

Urban Form, Growth, and Accessibility in Space and Time: Anatomy of Land Use at the Parcel-Level in a Small to Medium-Sized American City

“…It is ranked as the third best small to medium suburban city to live in the U.S. in 2018 by Livability [2]. The State and City's planning system is considered to be very successful in the U.S. by policy-makers and planners in terms of directing urban growth into urban growth boundaries and conserving more ecological values [40,46]. The first parcel in the City was established in 1853, and by 2014, there had been nearly fourteen thousand parcels supporting 55,298 people [47].…”

Morphological Indices as Urban Planning Tools in Northeastern Brazil

“…The authors in [5] demonstrate that the urbanization process affects climate at all scales. Several studies have shown strategies to minimize the impact of growth and of urban density on climate using urban planning as a tool to control land usage and coverage, as well as reduce the impact of the urbanization process [6][7][8]16,[22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36]. The relation between the urbanization process and climate is complex.…”

“…Different methods and techniques exist to analyze urban morphological indices, ranging from the use of spatial metrics [31][32][33][34][42][43][44], as is the case of the present study, to the use of satellite images [45][46][47][48][49][50]. Several indices may be used in such analyses, such as aerodynamic roughness, porosity, building density, verticality, H/W ratio, and impervious surface fraction, helping to minimize the impacts caused by city growth.…”