Integrating beneficiaries into assessment of ecosystem services from managed forests at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest,USA

Background：Forests contribute to human wellbeing through the provision of important ecosystem services.Methods：In this study,we investigated how the perceived importance of ecosystem services may impact the overall benefit provided by managed watersheds at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest over a 45-year period,using standardized measures of service capacity weighted by service importance weights derived from a survey of beneficiaries.Results：The capacity of watersheds to regulate water flow and quality was high in all watersheds throughout the study period,whereas cultural services such as scenic beauty declined after harvest.Impacts on greenhouse gas regulation depended on the efficiency with which harvested biomass was used.Surveys revealed that stakeholders placed high value on all ecosystem services,with regulating and cultural services seen as more important than provisioning services.When service metrics were weighted by survey responses and aggregated into a single measure,total service provision followed the same overall trend as greenhouse gas regulation.Where biomass use was less efficient in terms of greenhouse gas emissions,harvesting resulted in an overall ＂ecosystem service debt＂;where use was more efficient,this ＂ecosystem service debt＂ was reduced.Beneficiaries＇ educational backgrounds significantly affected overall assessment of service provision.Beneficiaries with college or university degrees incurred smaller ＂ecosystem service debts＂ and were less negatively affected by harvesting overall.Conclusions：This study highlights the importance of including empirical measures of beneficiary preference when attempting to quantify overall provision of ecosystem services to human beneficiaries over time.

Urbanity mapping reveals the complexity,diffuseness,diversity,and connectivity of urbanized areas

There are urgent calls for new approaches to map the global urban conditions of complexity,diffuseness,diversity,and connectivity.However,existing methods mostly focus on mapping urbanized areas as bio physical entities.Here,based on the continuum of urbanity framework,we developed an approach for cross-scale urbanity map-ping from town to city and urban megaregion with different spatial resolutions using the Google Earth Engine.This approach was developed based on multi-source remote sensing data,Points of Interest-Open Street Map(POIs-OSM)big data,and the random forest regression model.This approach is scale-independent and revealed significant spatial variations in urbanity,underscoring differences in urbanization patterns across megaregions and between urban and rural areas.Urbanity was observed transcending traditional urban boundaries,diffusing into rural settlements within non-urban locales.The finding of urbanity in rural communities far from urban areas challenges the gradient theory of urban-rural development and distribution.By mapping livelihoods,lifestyles,and connectivity simultaneously,urbanity maps present a more comprehensive characterization of the complex-ity,diffuseness,diversity,and connectivity of urbanized areas than that by land cover or population density alone.It helps enhance the understanding of urbanization beyond biophysical form.This approach can provide a multifaceted understanding of urbanization,and thereby insights on urban and regional sustainability.

Democratization of ecosystem services--a radical approach for assessing nature's benefits in the face of urbanization

Objectives:(1)To evaluate how ecosystem services may be utilized to either reinforce or fracture the planning and development practices that emerged from segregation and eco-nomic exclusion;(2)To survey the current state of ecosystem service assessments and synthesize a growing number of recommendations from the literature for renovating ecosys-tem service analyses.Methods:Utilizing current maps of ecosystem service distribution in Bushbuckridge Local Municipality,South Africa,we considered how a democratized process of assessing ecosys-tem services will produce a more nuanced representation of diverse values in society and capture heterogeneity in ecosystem structure and function.Results:We propose interventions for assessing ecosystem services that are inclusive of a broad range of stakeholders'values and result in actual quantification of social and ecological processes.We demonstrate how to operationalize a pluralistic framework for ecosystem service assessments.Conclusion:A democratized approach to ecosystem service assessments is a reimagined path to rescuing a poorly implemented concept and designing and managing future social-ecological systems that benefit people and support ecosystem integrity.It is the responsi-bility of scientists who do ecosystem services research to embrace more complex,pluralistic frameworks so that sound and inclusive scientific information is utilized in decision-making.

Evolution and future of urban ecological science:ecology in,of,and for the city

The contrast between ecology in cities and ecology of cities has emphasized the increasing scope of urban ecosystem research.Ecology in focuses on terrestrial and aquatic patches within cities,suburbs,and exurbs as analogs of non-urban habitats.Urban fabric outside analog patches is considered to be inhospi-table matrix.Ecology of the city differs from ecology in by treating entire urban mosaics as social-ecolog-ical systems.Ecology of urban ecosystems incorporates biological,social,and built components.Originally posed as a metaphor to visualize disciplinary evolution,this paper suggests that the contrast has conceptual,empirical,and methodological contents.That is,the contrast constitutes a disciplinary or“local”paradigm shift.The paradigm change between ecology in and ecology of represents increased complexity,moving from focus on biotic communities to holistic social-ecological systems.A third paradigm,ecology for the city,has emerged due to concern for urban sustainability.While ecology for includes the knowledge generated by both ecology in and ecology of,it considers researchers as a part of the system,and acknowledges that they may help envision and advance the social goals of urban sustainability.Using urban heterogeneity as a key urban feature,the three paradigms are shown to contrast in five important ways:disciplinary focus,the relevant theory of spatial heterogeneity,the technology for representing spatial structure,the resulting classification of urban mosaics,and the nature of application to sustainability.Ecology for the city encourages ecologists to engage with other specialists and urban dwellers to shape a more sustainable urban future.

Non-Algorithmically Integrating Land Use Type with Spatial Interpolation of Surface Soil Nutrients in an Urbanizing Watershed

Integrating land use type and other geographic information within spatial interpolation has been proposed as a solution to improve the performance and accuracy of soil nutrient mapping at the regional scale. This study developed a non-algorithm approach, i.e., applying inverse distance weighting （IDW） and ordinary kriging （OK）, to individual land use types rather than to the whole watershed, to determine if this improved the performance in mapping soil total C （TC）, total N （TN）, and total P （TP） in a 200-km2 urbanizing watershed in Southeast China. Four land use types were identified by visual interpretation as forest land, agricultural land, green land, and urban land. One hundred and fifty soil samples （0-10 cm） were taken according to land use type and patch size. Results showed that the non-algorithm approach, interpolation based on individual land use types, substantially improved the performance of IDW and OK for mapping TC, TN, and TP in the watershed. Root mean square errors were reduced by 3.9% for TC, 10.770 for TN, and 25.9% for TP by the application of IDW, while the improvements by OK were slightly lower as 0.9% for TC, 7.7% for TN, and 18.1% for TP. Interpolations based on individual land use types visually improved depiction of spatial patterns for TC, TN, and TP in the watershed relative to interpolations by the whole watershed. Substantial improvements might be expected with denser sampling points. We suggest that this non-algorithm approach might provide an alternative to algorithm-based approaches to depict watershed-scale nutrient patterns.

Does the ecological concept of disturbance have utility in urban social-ecological-technological systems?

The ecological concept of disturbance has scarcely been applied in urban systems except in the erroneous but commonplace assumption that urbanization itself is a disturbance and cities are therefore perennially disturbed systems.We evaluate the usefulness of the concept in urban ecology by exploring how a recent conceptual framework for disturbance(Peters et al.2011,Ecosphere,2,art 81)applies to these social-ecological-technological systems(SETS).Case studies,especially from the Long-Term Ecological Research sites of Baltimore and Phoenix,are presented to show the applicability of the framework for disturbances to different elements of these systems at different scales.We find that the framework is easily adapted to urban SETS and that incorporating social and technological drivers and responders can contribute additional insights to disturbance research beyond urban systems.

Integrating structure and function:mapping the hierarchical spatial heterogeneity of urban landscapes

Background:Cities are social-ecological systems characterized by remarkably high spatial and temporal heterogeneity,which are closely related to myriad urban problems.However,the tools to map and quantify this heterogeneity are lacking.We here developed a new three-level classification scheme,by considering ecosystem types(level 1),urban function zones(level 2),and land cover elements(level 3),to map and quantify the hierarchical spatial heterogeneity of urban landscapes.Methods:We applied the scheme using an object-based approach for classification using very high spatial resolution imagery and a vector layer of building location and characteristics.We used a top-down classification procedure by conducting the classification in the order of ecosystem types,function zones,and land cover elements.The classification of the lower level was based on the results of the higher level.We used an objectbased methodology to carry out the three-level classification.Results:We found that the urban ecosystem type accounted for 45.3%of the land within the Shenzhen city administrative boundary.Within the urban ecosystem type,residential and industrial zones were the main zones,accounting for 38.4%and 33.8%,respectively.Tree canopy was the dominant element in Shenzhen city,accounting for 55.6%over all ecosystem types,which includes agricultural and forest.However,in the urban ecosystem type,the proportion of tree canopy was only 22.6%because most trees were distributed in the forest ecosystem type.The proportion of trees was 23.2% in industrial zones,2.2%higher than that in residential zones.That information“hidden”in the usual statistical summaries scaled to the entire administrative unit of Shenzhen has great potential for improving urban management.Conclusions:This paper has taken the theoretical understanding of urban spatial heterogeneity and used it to generate a classification scheme that exploits remotely sensed imagery,infrastructural data available at a municipal level,and object-based spatial analysis.For effective planning and management,the hierarchical levels of landscape classification(level 1),the analysis of use and cover by urban zones(level 2),and the fundamental elements of land cover(level 3),each exposes different respects relevant to city plans and management.

Nitrogen regulation by natural systems in“unnatural”landscapes:denitrification in ultra-urban coastal ecosystems

Dense cities represent biogeochemical hot spots along the shoreline,concentrating fixed nitrogen that is subsequently discharged into adjacent coastal receiving waters.Thus,the ecosystem services provided by natural systems in highly urban environments can play a particularly important role in the global nitrogen cycle.In this paper,we review the recent literature on nitrogen regulation by temperate coastal ecosystems,with a focus on how the distinct physical and biogeochemical features of the urban landscape can affect the provision of this ecosystem service.We use Jamaica Bay,an ultra-urbanized coastal lagoon in the United States of America,as a demonstrative case study.Based on simple areal and tidal-based calculations,the natural systems of Jamaica Bay remove~24%of the reactive nitrogen discharged by wastewater treatment plants.However,this estimate does not represent the dynamic nature of urban nitrogen cycling represented in the recent literature and highlights key research needs and opportunities.Our review reveals that ecosystem-facilitated denitrification may be significant in even the most densely urbanized coastal landscapes,but critical uncertainties currently limit incorporation of this ecosystem service in environmental management.

Global urbanization as a shifting context for applying ecological science toward the sustainable city

There is an abundance of conceptual frameworks relevant to sustainability in urban systems.However,to advance urban ecological science and its application to sustainable urban transformations,key existing frameworks must be synthesized.This paper is a conceptual synthesis cast in essay form in order to encompass a broad range of relevant ideas.It starts from the premise that the familiar models of metropolitan and megalopolitan urban structure,of industrially driven urban development,and of the contrasts between urban and non-urban lands are manifestly inadequate representations of evolving global reality.Such inadequacy is illustrated with examples from the United States and from China.Both the form and the interactions involved in contemporary urbanization and urban change suggest the need for a new integrated framework synthesizing two existing yet still evolving concepts:(1)The urban megaregion framework accommodates the spatial extent,interdigitation of contrasting land uses,and the linked spatial relations between nominally urban and nominally rural areas.(2)The new concept of the continuum of urbanity emphasizes the shifts in livelihood and lifestyle driven by regional and global teleconnections and their joint effects on local environments and landscapes.Together these frameworks suggest a common conceptual structure for addressing urban areas of different ages,sizes,forms,and dynamics in both urbanizing and urbanized areas in developing and developed countries and regions.The synthesis of frameworks points to empirical research needs,and has the potential to better match sustainability plans and actions with the diverse urban forms and dynamics now appearing around the world.

Terrestrial denitrification:challenges and opportunities

Denitrification is a process of great environmental importance but is difficult to study in terrestrial ecosystems.Methods for quantifying the process are problematic,variability in activity is high,and temporal and spatial scaling challenges are extreme.Available methods are problematic for a variety of reasons;they change substrate concentrations,disturb the physical setting of the process,lack sensitivity or are prohibitively costly in time and expense.Most fundamentally,it is very difficult to quantify the dominant end-product(N_(2))of denitrification given its high background concentration in the atmosphere.Spatial and temporal variation in denitrification is high due to control of the process by multiple factors(oxygen,nitrate,carbon,pH,salinity,temperature etc.)that each vary in time and space.A particular challenge is that small areas(hotspots)and brief periods(hot moments)frequently account for a high percentage of N gas flux activity.These phenomena are challenging to account for in measurement,modeling and scaling efforts.The need for scaling is driven by the fact that there is a need for information on this microscale process at the ecosystem,landscape and regional scales where there are concerns about nitrogen effects on soil fertility,water quality and air quality.In this review,I outline the key challenges involved with denitrification and then describe specific opportunities for making progress on these challenges including advances in measurement methods,new conceptual approaches for addressing hotspot and hot moment dynamics,and new remote sensing and geographic information system–based scaling methods.Analysis of these opportunities suggests that we are poised to make great improvements in our understanding of terrestrial denitrification.These improvements will increase our basic science understanding of a complex biogeochemical process and our ability to manage widespread nitrogen pollution problems.