Salzau 2010 Abstracts February
2010
Ecosystem services demand and supply dynamics in a rural-urban landscape
Franziska Kroll 1 , Felix Müller 1 , Dagmar Haase 2
1 University of Kiel, Ecology Centre, Institute of Nature and Resource Protection
2 Humboldt University of Berlin, Department of Geography and Helmholtz Centre for
Environmental Research – UFZ, Department of Computational Landscape Ecology
The capacity of ecosystems to provide services is not identical to the actual and factual service provision in landscapes, the latter being a result of all human decisions and tradeoffs which affect ecosystem structures and functions. In this sense, the supply of ecosystem services refers to the generation of natural resources and services that are of interest for people, whereas the term ecosystem service demand corresponds to the people’s actual use of these resources (cf. McDonald
2009). As the majority of the human population is located in cities, urban regions are the focal places of human ecosystem service demands and, simultaneously, the primary source of global environmental impacts. The comparison of ecosystem services demand in urban regions and the corresponding supply of their rural hinterlands provide important arguments for managing resource metabolism and establishing sustainable policy strategies.
Set against that background, we present a method of ecosystem services quantification and mapping in physical units which aims at providing a generalisation that is applicable to further case study regions. We directly compare the demand and supply of the three essential provisioning services food, water, and energy during the time span 1990-2007 by linking both to the regional land cover structure. As case study region, we chose the eastern German urban region Leipzig-Halle which experienced severe socio-economic modifications and land use changes since the
German reunification in 1990. In order to consider the impacts of urban sprawl, land use change and socio-economic dynamics in the rural-urban continuum, the ruralurban gradient approach has been applied. We found that both, the demand as well as the supply of ecosystem services changed considerably during the time span under consideration. This observation is valid for the total ecosystem service demand and supply in the case study region as well as for its rural urban distribution.
Keywords: ecosystem services supply and demand; land use; land cover; rural-urban gradient; urban sprawl
Reference: McDonald R. (2009) Ecosystem service demand and supply along the urban-to-rural gradient. Journal of conservation planning 5:1-14.