The impact of land use/land cover scale on modelli

Authors: Darren R Grafius Ron Corstanje Philip H Warren Karl L Evans Steven Hancock Jim A Harris

Publish Date: 2016/01/19

Volume: 31, Issue: 7, Pages: 1509-1522

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Abstract

Urbanisation places increasing stress on ecosystem services however existing methods and data for testing relationships between service delivery and urban landscapes remain imprecise and uncertain Unknown impacts of scale are among several factors that complicate research This study models ecosystem services in the urban area comprising the towns of Milton Keynes Bedford and Luton which together represent a wide range of the urban forms present in the UKThe objectives of this study were to test 1 the sensitivity of ecosystem service model outputs to the spatial resolution of input data and 2 whether any resultant scale dependency is constant across different ecosystem services and model approaches eg stock versus flowbasedFine scale analysis generated higher estimates of total carbon storage 932 vs 717 kg m−2 and much lower potential sediment erosion estimates 64 vs 181 Mg km−2 year−1 than analyses conducted at coarser resolutions however coarsescale analysis estimated more abundant pollination service provisionScale sensitivities depend on the type of service being modelled stock estimates eg carbon storage are most sensitive to aggregation across scales dynamic flow models eg sediment erosion are most sensitive to spatial resolution and ecological process models involving both stocks and dynamics eg pollination are sensitive to both Care must be taken to select model data appropriate to the scale of inquiryThe first of these primarily concerns our understanding of the key processes that underpin services and how these work in different ecosystems ie the mechanisms used in the modelling process The second the scale and classification of data on the environment concerns the nature of input data and is our focus here

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