Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2-21-2020
Department
College of Forest Resources and Environmental Science
Abstract
Urban green spaces play a crucial role in maintaining urban ecosystem sustainability by providing numerous ecosystem services. How to quantify and evaluate the ecological benefits and services of urban green spaces remains a hot topic currently, while the evaluation is barely applied or implemented in urban design and planning. In this study, super-high-resolution aerial images were used to acquire the spatial distribution of urban green spaces; a modified pre-stratified random sampling method was applied to obtain the vegetation information of the four types of urban green spaces in Luohe, a common plain city in China; and i-Tree Eco model was further used to assess the vegetation structure and various ecosystem services including air quality improvement, rainfall interception, carbon storage, and sequestration provided by four types of urban green spaces. The modeling results reveal that there were about 1,006,251 trees in this area. In 2013, all the trees in these green spaces could store about 54,329 t of carbon, sequester about 4973 t of gross carbon, remove 92 t of air pollutants, and avoid 122,637 m3 of runoff. The study illustrates an innovative method to reveal different types of urban green spaces with distinct ecosystem service productivity capacity to better understand their various roles in regulating the urban environment. The results could be used to assist urban planners and policymakers to optimize urban green space structure and composition to maximize ecosystem services provision.
Publication Title
Sustainability
Recommended Citation
Song, P.,
Kim, G.,
Mayer, A. L.,
He, R.,
&
Tian, G.
(2020).
Assessing the ecosystem services of various types of urban green spaces based on i-Tree eco.
Sustainability,
12(4).
http://doi.org/10.3390/su12041630
Retrieved from: https://digitalcommons.mtu.edu/michigantech-p/1742
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Version
Publisher's PDF
Publisher's Statement
© 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Publisher’s version of record: https://doi.org/10.3390/su12041630