Scientific analysis of urban green spaces and its ecosystem services

Abstract:

The accelerated urban and population growth in the last decades has intensified the need for research about urban ecosystem and their services associated with the urban population’s well-being through nature conservation. The acknowledgment of ecosystem services provided by Urban Green Spaces (UGSs) can support decision-making to promote urban sustainable development, therefore conserving and/or restoring ecosystem services and biodiversity aiming to adapt urban people to the forthcoming challenges of climate change. This article aims to assess how ecosystem services provided by UGSs have been evolved in the scientific community. A scientometric survey and a bibliographical analysis of the main articles helped to assess the current scientific knowledge, the main theoretical limitations and gaps, as well as the opportunities for advancing the knowledge on this subject. Results indicate that researches on ecosystem services in UGSs increased since 2005 at an annual exponential growth rate of 30%, especially in more developed countries. Bibliographical analysis points out that both regulatory and cultural ecosystem services in urban context are those which has been attributed higher importance, and that new methodologies are necessary to assess and possibly to value these services.

Keywords:
extreme events; carbon stock; evapotranspiration, green Infrastructure; ecosystem services