An ecosystem services-based approach for decision-making in urban planning

Changes relating to the development of land use often negatively impact on ecosystem services (ES), which in turn impairs the ability of ecosystems to sustain such services. The assessment of land suitability is a critical step in land use planning, but it may have some shortcomings and may fail to represent the diversity of ES-related features of geographical places. To address this issue, this paper proposes a method that integrates the ES approach with contemporary land suitability evaluation. The study consists of three steps: (1) Land suitability analysis: represents the geology, morphology, land capability, hydrology, erosion and habitat vulnerability, (2) Integrated ES mapping: represents the integrated value of provisioning, regulating and cultural ES potential together and (3) Land suitability evaluation based on integrated ES mapping (ES-Integrated Suitability Map): represents ES-based land suitability. The results demonstrate that there is a significant difference between the conventional and ES-integrated land suitability evaluations. According to the results of the conventional land suitability analysis, while 29.8% of land has excellent and 23.6% good suitability conditions for new development, the ES-integrated land suitability evaluation reveals that only 0.18% and 5.35% of land has excellent and good suitability for new development, respectively, in Duzce. This study shows that the introduction of the ES approach can have an important contribution to spatial decision-making. In addition, this method provides an approach to represent the place-based attributes of space better through the integration of ES into land suitability and can thus help to make environmental concerns a priority in spatial decision-making.