An Assessment of the Potential of Ecosystem Services in Municipalities: A Simplified Evaluation Approach Using Open Data and Open-Source Software

Urban sprawl promotes significant changes in land use and occupation by interfering with the dynamics of functional ecosystems. Among other things, it encourages forest fragmentation, the degradation of woodland edges, and altered habitat integrity. This study aims to propose a simplified and low-cost methodological framework that integrates open data and open-source tools to monitor the potential of ecosystem services (ESs) at the municipal scale. Guided by the hypothesis that rapid suburbanization leads to measurable declines in ecological integrity, the InVEST Habitat Quality model was used as a proxy to analyze the landscape’s capacity to support ES. The procedure included data acquisition and organization, land use reclassification, and scores for the threats and sensitivities, implemented through the InVEST software 3.14.2. Results indicated that urban areas more than doubled between 1985 and 2005, while habitat quality scores declined across Campinas, reflecting a decrease in the potential for ES provision. Urban expansion, mainly concentrated in the central region, occurred at the expense of agricultural and pasture areas. Forest remnants, which currently occupy only 8.5% of the municipal territory, are small and fragmented, intensifying edge effects and reducing the potential capacity to provide regulatory ES. Fragmentation and adjacent land use changes limit these habitats’ capacity to provide ES. The proposed methodology demonstrates the potential for simple and reproducible monitoring of ecosystem services at the municipal scale, providing support to local governments with limited financial and technical capacity in geospatial data processing. This framework enables municipalities to incorporate environmental indicators into planning tools, offering a scalable approach for monitoring ecosystem dynamics in urbanized regions.