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Huang, Jieying (Jenny)

University of British Columbia

Understanding the social-ecological impacts and tradeoffs associated with urbanization is one of humanity's most pressing global challenges. Urban green- and bluespaces are widely recognized as foundational to sustainable urban development. Yet effective indicators and tools for regional mapping, monitoring, and assessing both terrestrial (“green”) and aquatic (“blue”) spaces across highly heterogenous urban environments remains challenging. This research develops new approaches to evaluate land use as a driver of ecosystem services in urban landscapes by leveraging a range of geospatial innovations and then evaluating their utility for assessing and monitoring both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystem services in Metro Vancouver, BC, Canada. First, I developed a new suite of high spatial resolution landscape indicators characterizing urban land cover attributes relevant to urban stream condition and then evaluated their utility for explaining the variation of heavy metal concentrations (Chapter 2) and benthic macroinvertebrates (Chapter 3). My findings demonstrated improvements in the effectiveness of landscape indicators for monitoring water quality when multi-scale land cover attributes and seasonal dynamics are incorporated. Turning to greenspaces in Chapter 4, I adapted spatial prioritization (a commonly employed approach used in systematic conservation planning) to a novel urban context: identifying greenspaces with the most diverse, complementary, and accessible recreational opportunities. Not only did I provide an important “proof-of-concept” for the use of spatial prioritization in recreational planning, I demonstrated the strength of using fine-scale (i.e. localized, pixel-based) measures of accessibility for identifying portfolios of park amenities. In Chapter 5, I further explored spatial prioritization for evaluating diverse recreational scenarios for the general populace and young children, offering insights into potential tradeoffs in urban planning for different age groups. Moreover, by examining land cover attributes associated with various recreation scenarios, these results emphasize the importance of integrating ecological perspectives into planning for better understanding of both recreational and ecological tradeoffs. Overall, this dissertation demonstrates that high-resolution landscape indicators and spatial prioritization approaches are effective tools for monitoring and assessing urban green- and bluespaces across multiple spatial scales and are well-suited for the complexities of heterogenous urban landscapes. These findings provide valuable insights for managers and offer practical tools to support strategic planning for multi-functional urban environments.

Text

2025-07-10

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/91549

Forestry

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/