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Abstract :
[en] Urban areas exhibit a large variety of patterns which may affect the negative externalities of human settlements on ecosystems. Ecosystem Services (ES) can help assessing the urban pressure on the environment and its impact on the well-being of inhabitants. Compactness or densities have often been associated to potential ES. Yet, the effects of the relative spatial arrangement of vegetation, forests and water bodies, with respect to the urban lands - which are source of anthropogenic CO2 emissions - on potential ES are still not systematically analysed.
In this work we propose a typology, for about 800 European urban areas (>50,000 inhabitants) based on the intra-urban structure of cities and the associated ES potentials. The GMES/Copernicus Urban Atlas 2012 database provides a comparable definition of urban area and land use categories, necessary to a systematic cross-European analysis. More particularly, we investigate the share of different land uses and the distance between human settlements, forests and the other vegetated lands as well as their relative spatial distribution within urban settlements. We then use spatial metrics as proxies for urban ES associated with urban forests – e.g., micro climate regulation (air cooling, shade), air pollution removal (canopy), rainwater runoff (impervious lands). The typology is created using an unsupervised machine learning approach (clustering) with standardized spatial metrics as input data.
Different urban “forest cultures” across the continent are observable. Urban areas around the Mediterranean sea - facing warmer temperatures - attribute significantly more space to herbaceous lands (10 to 70%), but generally less than 10% for forests. Transport networks and infrastructures are more present along the axe going from central UK, to Italy and on the east coast of Spain (5 to 9%). Similarly, Industrial built up lands are more present along this axe, including west Germany, Romania and the east coast of Spain (5 to 22%).
Disciplines :
Physical, chemical, mathematical & earth Sciences: Multidisciplinary, general & others