Urban Ecosystem Services: Land Cover and Potential of Urban Soils

Urban Ecosystem Services are being employed to provide different solutions to the issues affecting contemporary settlements, such as climate change mitigation, social inequities, and well-being. Therefore, urban greening strategies play a crucial role in supporting, enhancing, and safeguarding ecosystem functions within the urban context. The supply of urban ecosystem services depends on the availability and spatial distribution of green and blue areas, thus on the strategic decisions on land use allocations that are made during planning processes. Urban planning also determines the distribution of population and functions within the city, which influences ecosystem services (ES) demand, as well as other properties of the city's physical structure (e.g., accessibility), which play a key role in defining who benefits from ES. To make cities increasingly sustainable, it is necessary to increase the number of areas able to express and support ecosystem functions and thus new ES provisions. So, it is necessary to understand what free soils are and how they are spatialized in urban areas, able to support ecosystem functions and express related services. This paper explores the possibility of using GIS-based and Machine Learning techniques for identifying urbanized areas that can provide (source) or utilize (sink) ES, based on the degree of land transformation. The study is part of a broader research context that aims to assess the relationships between urban configurations, land use, and ES, considering the integration of urban ES and extra-urban ES in governance processes.