Ecosystem services potential is declining across European capital metropolitan areas.

Ecosystem services (ES) are essential to sustainable development at multiple spatial scales. Monitoring ES potential (ESP) at the metropolitan level is imperative to sustainable cities. We developed a procedure for long-term monitoring of metropolitan ESP dynamics, utilizing open-source land use land cover (LULC) data and the expert matrix method. We compared the ESP results of 38 European Capital Metropolitan Areas (ECMA) regarding biodiversity integrity, drinking water provision, flood protection, air quality, water purification, and recreation & tourism. Our results show significant declines in ESP across ECMA due to LULC alteration between 2006, 2012, and 2018. We found that ECMA in post-socialist European countries like Poland (Warszawa) have experienced high rates of land use transformation with a remarkable impact on ESP. Surprisingly, we found that Fennoscandinan ECMA, like Helsinki, Stockholm, and Oslo which lead the cumulative ESP ranking, faced the ESP reduction of the highest impact in recent years. The correlation analysis of ESP dynamics to urban expansion and population growth rates suggests that inattentive urbanization processes impact ESP more than population growth. We unveil the implications of our results to the EU and global level agendas like the European Nature Conservation Law and the Sustainable Development Goals.

Identifying barriers for nature-based solutions in flood risk management: An interdisciplinary overview using expert community approach.

The major event that hit Europe in summer 2021 reminds society that floods are recurrent and among the costliest and deadliest natural hazards. The long-term flood risk management (FRM) efforts preferring sole technical measures to prevent and mitigate floods have shown to be not sufficiently effective and sensitive to the environment. Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) mark a recent paradigm shift of FRM towards solutions that use nature-derived features, processes and management options to improve water retention and mitigate floods. Yet, the empirical evidence on the effects of NBS across various settings remains fragmented and their implementation faces a series of institutional barriers. In this paper, we adopt a community expert perspective drawing upon LAND4FLOOD Natural flood retention on private land network (https://www.land4flood.eu) in order to identify a set of barriers and their cascading and compound interactions relevant to individual NBS. The experts identified a comprehensive set of 17 barriers affecting the implementation of 12 groups of NBS in both urban and rural settings in five European regional environmental domains (i.e., Boreal, Atlantic, Continental, Alpine-Carpathian, and Mediterranean). Based on the results, we define avenues for further research, connecting hydrology and soil science, on the one hand, and land use planning, social geography and economics, on the other. Our suggestions ultimately call for a transdisciplinary turn in the research of NBS in FRM.

A GIS-based method for revealing the transversal continuum of natural landscapes in the coastal zone.

The method presented in this article is helpful for analyzing the landscape properties and unfolding the transversal continuity of natural landscapes in the coastal zone. The novel conceptual approach to analyze the landscape structure in the transversal direction with reference to coastline is different from others focusing on the longitudinal analysis of landscape properties in the coastal areas. The procedure is relying on the fundamental questioning of the spatial relation of each landscape patch with the coastline. The raw material is Land-Use/ Land-Cover (LULC) data. At this stage the method is tested successfully utilizing CORINE Land Cover (CLC) data. The method is structured in four sequential stages, and formalized via ModelBuilder/ ArcGIS software into a model applicable to any coastal zone. The output of each phase is used as the raw material of the following stage. The presented method is useful in identifying a set of endangered natural landscape patches located as a hinge in between two transversally connected natural landscape mosaics (TCNLM). A second set is highlighted as potential artificial surfaces located as barriers between the coastline and TCNLM. The presented method is useful in the analysis stages of Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) and Sustainable Coastal Tourism (SCT). •The presented procedure focuses on the transversal landscape structure in the coastal zone rather that the classical longitudinal analysis of coastal landscapes.•The procedure brings a new way of CORINE Land Cover data utilization beyond its basic monitoring objective, useful for a variety of decision making and management processes such as; Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM), Sustainable Coastal Tourism (SCT), Environmental protection, Landscape connectivity, etc.•The method builds a novel tool set customized via ModelBuilder in ArcGIS, being applicable to any coastal zone.