urban soil ecosystem services - copernicus meetings · •urban soil challenges grouping reflects...
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Contributing to sustainable urban development
Jess Davies, Roisin O’Riordan, Carly Stevens, John Quinton, Chris Boyko - Lancaster University
Urban SoilEcosystem services
Urban soil provides multiple ecosystem services
Flood mitigation
Food growing
Greenspaces for physical
& mental health
Local climate
Carbon storage
Urban biodiversity
+ growing urban
population
• Urban soil ecosystem services are increasingly being studied (Morel et al., 2015; Vasenev et al., 2018; Blanchart et al., 2018)
• More emphasis is being placed on the importance of urban soil ES
• Studies often consider ES in general or methods for quantification
• However, there is a gap in bringing together what we currently know
Urban soil ES: what do we know?
We undertook a systematic literature review to find out what we know about urban soil ES research
Key questions:
• Which ES are provided by urban soils?
• To what extent have they been studied?
• How they will be altered by future drivers of change?
• Literature is relatively small and recent
• Most research undertaken in the USA, and much in Europe and China
• Many papers take a global perspective i.e. ‘world’ papers – often review papers that discuss importance or approaches
Review: the ecosystem services of urban soils
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Which ES have been studied?
• Research focuses on supporting processes (88%)
➢ predominance on soil biological activity and nutrient stocks
➢ Less focus on water cycling
• Regulating services also frequently studied (67%)
➢ focus on soil carbon storage and recycling of wastes and detoxification
• Notable gap in provisioning services
➢ urban food rarely studied – contrast to non-urban soil studies where food is important service from soil
• Gap in studies on cultural services
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Provisioning Regulating CulturalSupporting
Interrelation between services
• Most papers (59%) studied only one ES
• Only 14% studied three ES
• Supporting processes often studied together – shows processes are interlinked
➢E.g. Nutrient cycling & soil boil activity
Multifunctionality not quantified
• Lack of services studied together suggests the multifunctionality of urban soil is being missed
Nutrient cycling Soil biological activity
MEA (2005)
Which ES have been studied?
Multi-functionality
Used to explore structure of the research community
3 groupings identified:
• Soil carbon & nutrients
• Soil biodiversity & activity
• Urban soil challenges
Grouping reflects literature analysis:
• research focuses on supporting services
• predominance on soil biological activity, soil carbon and nutrient stocks
Gaps in key terms:
• terms associated with water
• Food & urban growing
• Cultural services not represented
Soil carbon
& nutrients
Soil biodiversity
Urban soil
challenges
Key terms in literature: Co-occurrence analysis
Gaps in knowledge & recommendations
We summarise the main gaps in knowledge and make recommendations for future work:
• Water – SUDS and stormwater community to link up with ES community
• Food – urban food community – enable urban food to be quantified
• Cultural – links between soil and the myriad benefits to people in cities need to be highlighted
• Interconnection between communities – aid the study of multiple services and enable inclusion of soil multifunctionality into planning
• Global research – research to expand into a broader range of countries
• Future drivers of change – soil sealing, climate change, use of technosols
This review provides a big picture overview of what we know about ES from urban soils.
We hope it will enable them to be better managed to support future human wellbeing and urban ecosystems.
Urban food
Cultural services
Drivers of change
The review paper is nearing submission.
Please get in touch if you’d like to discuss further!
Roisin O’Riordan
@Roisin_OR
www.soilvalue.co.uk
Thanks!
Project team:
Jess Davies, Carly Stevens, John Quinton, Chris Boyko
Lancaster University