David N. Barton

Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA) · Department of Landscape Ecology, Oslo

Recreational activity is the single most valuable ecosystem service in many developed countries with a range of benefits for public health. Crowdsourced recreational activity data is increasingly being adopted in management and monitoring of urban landscapes, however inherent biases in the data make it difficult to generalize patterns to the total...

Tree visibility is a key determinant of cultural ecosystem services of urban trees. This paper develops a flexible, efficient and easy-to-use GIS method for modelling individual tree visibility to support tree valuation. The method is implemented as a GRASS GIS AddOn tool called v.viewshed.impact, making it available to a broad spectrum of users an...

In this paper, we demonstrate value generalisation from a sample of ecosystem assets – municipally managed trees - to all tree assets within an urban ecosystem accounting area. A Bayesian network model is used to machine-learn non-parametric correlation patterns between biophysical site condition variables and output variables of an ecosystem servi...

Ecosystem accounting is a statistical framework that aims to track the state of ecosystems and ecosystem services, with periodic updates. This framework follows the statistical standard of the System of Environmental Economic Accounting Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA EA). SEEA EA is composed of physical ecosystem extent, condition and ecosystem service...

The paper argues that monetary valuation of ecosystem services for ecosystem accounting needs to be sensitive to institutional context, when simulating markets to generate exchange values where none was available previously and when conducting value generalisation that extrapolates exchange values from specific sites to the whole acounting area. Th...

The understanding of urban social-ecological systems requires integrated and interdisciplinary methods. This paper explores differences in the accessibility of urban green spaces (UGS) based on urban morphology. In contrast to other comparative analyses that followed simplified quantification of UGS provision and/or omitted the impact of morphologi...

The European Space Agency’s Sentinel satellites have laid the foundation for global land use land cover (LULC) mapping with unprecedented detail at 10 m resolution. We present a cross-comparison and accuracy assessment of Google’s Dynamic World (DW), ESA’s World Cover (WC) and Esri’s Land Cover (Esri) products for the first time in order to inform...

Sustainable land use within the framework of local self-government

This is the final text version of Chapter 1. A laid-out version of the full assessment report will be made available in the coming months.

This is the final text version of Chapter 4. A laid-out version of the full assessment report will be made available in the coming months.

Modelling walking distance enables the observation of non-linearities in hedonic property pricing of accessibility to greenspace. We test a penalized spline spatial error model (PS-SEM), which has two distinctive features. First, the PS-SEM controls for the presence of a spatially autocorrelated error term. Second, the PS-SEM allows for continuous...

Significance Statement Coastal and marine ecosystems face historical deterioration worldwide. This negatively affects the provisioning of ecosystem services to society. The UN has recently approved a statistical standard for ecosystem accounting to measure the contribution of ecosystem services to the national economy and track changes in the value...

With the changing climate, more extreme precipitation events are expected in Norway, and thus good stormwater management becomes more and more important. The Norwegian White Paper on stormwater in cities and towns 1 proposes introduction of a stormwater fee to finance stormwater management. Today, stormwater, regardless of its degree of pollution,...

Many urban areas around the world are facing increasing pressure on stormwater management systems due to urbanization and extreme weather events caused by climate change. Low impact development (LID), including blue-green infrastructure such as rain gardens, has become an attractive addition to traditional gray infrastructure for managing stormwate...

A stormwater fee for Oslo? A computational approach to user financed climate readiness. Stormwater fee systems constitute a potential policy instrument for user financed climate readiness in Norwegian cities. Stormwater fees can contribute to operation and future maintenance requirements of stormwater networks and wastewater treatment required wit...

Mobility restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic ostensibly prevented the public from transmitting the disease in public places, but they also hampered outdoor recreation, despite the importance of blue-green spaces (e.g., parks and natural areas) for physical and mental health. We assess whether restrictions on human movement, particularly in bl...

Performance-based green area indicators are increasingly used as policy instruments to promote nature-based solutions in urban property development. We explore the differences and parallels of three green area indicators: Berlin’s Biotope Area Factor (BAF), Stockholm’s Green Area Factor (GYF) and Oslo’s Blue Green Factor (BGF). As policy instrument...

LiDAR-based segmentation of urban tree canopies and their physical properties (canopy height, canopy diameter, 3D surface and volume) is a replicable, complementary and useful information source for urban ecosystem condition accounts, and an important basis for ecosystem service modeling and valuation. However, using available LiDAR data collected...

The article enhances the knowledge base for the assessment of urban ecosystem services, within the United Nations System of Environmental-Economic Accounting Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA EA), recently adopted as an international statistical standard. The SEEA EA is based on spatial extent accounts (area of ecosystems) and biophysical condition accoun...

In Oslo, as elsewhere, the COVID-19 outbreak and the following lockdown measures during spring 2020 led to increased use of urban green infrastructure. Whether this has led to more durable changes in recreation patterns remains an open question. We used mobile tracking data from 53,000 STRAVA users to explore the longevity of increases in recreatio...

Spatial multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) is increasingly being used to inform urban green infrastructure planning. We explore the use of modern cloud computing technologies (Google Earth Engine) to facilitate public access to spatial MCDA of ecosystem services from green infrastructure. Using the spatial prioritization of green roof retrofit...

Urban green and blue space interventions may bring about unintended consequences, involving trade-offs between the different land uses, and indeed, between the needs of different urban inhabitants, land users, and owners. Such trade-offs include choices between green/blue and non-green/blue projects, between broader land sparing vs. land sharing pa...

Paper available online here: https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol26/iss2/art35/ Understanding opportunities as well as constraints for people to benefit from and take care of urban nature is an important step toward more sustainable cities. In order to explore, engage, and enable strategies to improve urban quality of life, we combine a social-ec...

This report outlines the ecosystem accounting applications that have been presented in the Ecosystem Services World Conference in Hannover, Germany in 2019. Eight cases are summarized here; applications of ecosystem accounts in Europe, Canada, Czech Republic, Germany, Uganda, Bulgaria, Andalusia-Spain and Oslo-Norway. Most of these applications are...

The global response to the COVID-19 pandemic has brought with it significant changes to human mobility patterns and working environments. We aimed to explore how social distancing measures affected recreational use of urban green space during the partial lockdown in Oslo, Norway. Mobile tracking data from thousands of recreationists were used to an...

Construction of ecosystem accounts requires conversion of biophysical measurements of ecosystem services supply and use into monetary terms. A range of valuation methods are compatible with the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA) methodological framework for this purpose. Benefit transfer (BT) method is not seen as an eligible method...

Valuing the ecosystem services of urban trees is important for gaining public and political support for urban tree conservation and maintenance. The i-Tree Eco software application can be used to estimate regulating ecosystem services provided by urban forests. However, existing municipal tree inventories may not contain data necessary for running...

Urban and peri-urban green space provides multiple recreation opportunities with important benefits for physical and psychological well-being, but access to these benefits is often unequally distributed. Various methodologies to assess outdoor recreation opportunities exist, but they rarely take into consideration dimensions of environmental justic...

The global response to the COVID-19 pandemic has brought with it significant changes to human mobility patterns. We aimed to explore how social distancing measures affected recreational use of urban green space during the partial lockdown in Oslo, Norway. Mobile tracking data from thousands of recreationists were used to analyze high resolution spa...

This article presents a literature study of the comprehensive amount of North-American wilderness research. In recent years there has been a paradigm shift in national park policy and management in Norway from nature protection towards wise tourism use of the areas. A national branding strategy for National Park (NP) tourism and a program for devel...

The paper demonstrates the use of Bayesian networks in multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) of environmental design alternatives for environmental flows (eflows) and physical habitat remediation measures in the Man-dalselva River in Norway. We demonstrate how MCDA using multi-attribute value functions can be implemented in a Bayesian network with...

We implement a multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) on environmental design alternatives for environmental flows (eflows) and physical habitat remediation measures in the Mandalselva River in Norway. This methods paper provides further documentation of the ecosystem service sub-models and their implementation in Hugin Expert software. We demonstr...

The predicted extreme temperatures of global warming are magnified in cities due to the urban heat island effect. Even if the target for average temperature increase in the Paris Climate Agreement is met, temperatures during the hottest month in a northern city like Oslo are predicted to rise by over 5 °C by 2050. We hypothesised that heat-related...

The paper demonstrates the use of Bayesian networks in multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) of environmental design alternatives for environmental flows (eflows) and physical habitat remediation measures in the Man-dalselva River in Norway. We demonstrate how MCDA using multi-attribute value functions can be implemented in a Bayesian network with...

As cities face increasing pressure from densification trends, green roofs represent a valuable source of ecosystem services for residents of compact metropolises where available green space is scarce. However, to date little research has been conducted regarding the holistic benefits of green roofs at a citywide scale, with local policymakers lacki...

Talk at the seminar Din Oslofjord

NIVA report 7420-2019

This paper has been produced as part of the UN Statistical Division Revision of Experimental Economic Accounting. Details of the revision’s aims and progress, and other draft chapters produced for the revision, are given at: https://seea.un.org/content/seea-experimental-ecosystem-accounting-revision This chapter contains the following sections....

There is increasing interest in the use of economic valuation of ecosystem goods and services for a wide variety of purposes. These include relatively familiar uses in project appraisal and more novel applications in advocacy, performance tracking and accounting in public and private settings. Decision makers who use valuation information need to u...

Norway is the largest hydropower producer in Europe and provides currently 96% of domestic electricity supplies. Hydropower is a renewable and climate friendly source of energy, but causes an impairment on local environmental conditions, recreational use and aesthetics in and along impacted watercourses and lakes. Around 70% of the larger Norwegian...

The circumstances under which different ecosystem service benefits can be realised differ. Benefits tend to be co-produced and enabled by multiple interacting social, ecological, and technological factors, which is particularly evident in cities. As many cities are undergoing rapid change, these factors need to be better understood and accounted fo...

Paper submitted to the Expert Meeting on Advancing the Measurement of Ecosystem Services for Ecosystem Accounting, New York, 22-24 January 2019 and subsequently revised. Version of 25 March 2019. Available at: https://seea.un.org/events/expert-meeting-advancing-measurement-ecosystemservices-ecosystem-accounting

The European Union (EU) Horizon 2020 Coordination and Support Action ESMERALDA aimed at developing guidance and a flexible methodology for Mapping and Assessment of Ecosystems and their Services (MAES) to support the EU member states in the implementation of the EU Biodiversity Strategy’s Target 2 Action 5. ESMERALDA’s key tasks included network cr...

Are bigger green spaces more diverse in terms of their natural and manmade elements? Does higher diversity mean they are more attractive to users and encourage more diversity of activities, and thereby provide a wider range of recreational ecosystem services? We assessed and classified the recreational services in green urban spaces in the city of...

The ecosystem service (ES) concept is becoming mainstream in policy and planning, but operational influence on practice is seldom reported. Here, we report the practitioners' perspectives on the practical implementation of the ES concept in 27 case studies. A standardised anonymous survey (n=246), was used, focusing on the science-practice interact...

The Ecosystem Services (ES) concept highlights the varied contributions the environment provides to humans and there are a wide range of methods/tools available to assess ES. However, in real-world decision contexts a single tool is rarely sufficient and methods must be combined to meet practitioner needs. Here, results from the OpenNESS project ar...

The operational challenges of integrated ecosystem service (ES) appraisals are determined by study purpose, system complexity and uncertainty, decision-makers' requirements for reliability and accuracy of methods, and approaches to stakeholder-science interaction in different decision contexts. To explore these factors we defined an information gap...

As the ecosystem service concept has become more widely recognised, so the number of biophysical, socio-cultural and monetary methods available to assess ecosystem services has increased. There is relatively little guidance on how to select and combine these methods into hybrid approaches that address policy purposes. Based on experiences from 27 c...

Urban trees provide a range of cultural, provisioning, regulating and supporting ecosystem services. Despite trees’ important role in the urban environment, Norway lacks a system to value urban trees that is adapted to conditions in cities in Norway. Currently the VAT03 valuation method, developed by Randrup et al. (2003) in Denmark, is used withou...

The blue-green factor (BGF) is a rapid assessment tool to help quantify minimum municipal requirements for surface water management, vegetation qualities and biodiversity in outdoor areas of property developments. BGF-QGIS makes it possible to calculate the blue-green factor for larger areas than in the original Excel-based methodology, by taking a...

The concept of ecosystem services is widely used in the scientific literature and increasingly also in policy and practice. Nevertheless, operationalising the concept, i.e. putting it into practice, is still a challenge. We describe the approach of the EU-project OpenNESS (Operationalisation of Ecosystem Services and Natural Capital), which was cre...

Pollinating insects are an integral part of cities’ natural capital and perform an important ecosystem function with a high degree of relevance to many cultural ecosystem services. Consequently, pollinators serve as a useful proxy for assessing urban biodiversity. Beekeeping has recently emerged as a popular activity in many urban areas and a good...

Nine Bayesian Belief Networks (BBNs) were developed within the OpenNESS project specifically for modelling ecosystem services for case study applications. The novelty of the method, its ability to explore problems, to address uncertainty, and to facilitate stakeholder interaction in the process were all reasons for choosing BBNs. Most case studies...

Ecosystem service (ES) spatial modelling is a key component of the integrated assessments designed to support policies and management practices aiming at environmental sustainability. ESTIMAP ("Ecosystem Service Mapping Tool") is a collection of spatially explicit models, originally developed to support policies at a European scale. We based our an...

Progress towards sustainable development ultimately depends on policy makers' and practitioners' capacities to protect Natural Capital (NC) stocks so that they are not exploited beyond Earth's capability to renew them. This involves a sound understanding of the benefits and values derived by society from NC and ecosystem services (ES). Scientific e...

Spatial planning has to deal with trade-offs between various stakeholders’ wishes and needs as part of planning and management of landscapes, natural resources and/or biodiversity. To make ecosystem services (ES) trade-off research more relevant for spatial planning, we propose an analytical framework, which puts stakeholders, their land-use/manage...

A range of methods are available for assessing ecosystem services. Methods differ in their aims; from mapping and modelling the supply and demand of ecosystem services to appraising their economic and non-economic importance through valuation techniques. Comprehensive guidance for the selection of appropriate ecosystem service assessment methods th...