Models for Assessing Urban Ecosystem Services: Status and Outlooks

Abstract

Urban ecosystem services provide many benefits for human beings. Given the dramatic increase of urbanization, maintaining sustainability of cities relies heavily on ecosystem services, and it is crucial for quantifying, managing, and optimizing urban ecosystem services to promote social and ecological sustainable development. This study presents the review of models for assessing urban ecosystem services through gathering the pertinent literatures which were published recent years. The main types of approaches for assessing urban ecosystem services were summarized, and the model simulation approach was detailed. From modelling techniques to the existing models, it was found that a process-based model is, relatively, a better way to detect the mechanism of urban ecological processes and simulate the future dynamic changes of urban ecosystem services. Three key limitations of existing products and frameworks were identified: (1) lacking understanding of multiple urban ecosystem services interactions, (2) ignoring accounting the socioeconomic factors into dynamics of urban ecosystem, and (3) lacking considerations of feedback effects between social system and urban ecosystem. The study concludes with outlooks that a comprehensive social-ecosystem model based on the social-ecological framework is helpful to reveal the relationships and interactions among various urban ecosystem services, and can better assess how human-induced urban growth affects ecosystem services, and better describe the feedback effect between the social environment and urban ecosystem services, as well as dynamically predict the changes of urban ecosystem services under different scenarios in future long time series.

Implications of ecosystem services and ecological network coupling for ecological planning in karst regions of China

“…Biodiversity. There are a number of well-defined indicators and methods for measuring ecosystem services (Bennett et al, 2009;Ouyang and Luo, 2022). Among these, biodiversity is a particularly important indicator in measuring ecosystem services (Steffen et al, 2011), and the signing of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in 1992 has made biodiversity a fundamental value in measuring ecosystems (Weiss, 1992), with more diverse ecosystems being more adaptive and resilient to change.…”

Towards an urban ecosystem model through a cross-cultural Chinese and greek knowledge analysis

“…Ample evidence shows that when cities grow and expand, concurrently their natural areas may be replaced with buildings and infrastructure, thus damaging their urban ecosystems (Lin et al , 2021; Ouyang and Luo, 2022). Related to this, urban ecosystems are often subject to pollution and other forms of environmental degradation, which can further impact the health and resilience of the ecosystem (La Notte et al , 2016).…”

The Systematic Review of Ecosystem Services in Peri-Urban Area

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