Luis Inostroza

Mendel University in Brno · Department of Environmentalistics and Natural Resources

Cities are vortex of the anthropogenic accumulated matter: technomass. The urban metabolism captures ecological stocks from other ecosystems to produce technomass in a complex process involving stocks and fluxes, energy and information. As such, the physical development of cities is entangled with the material productivity of other ecosystems, wher...

Urbanisation is transforming landscapes across the world. As the urban matrix is extending across all landscape types, new spatial configurations have blurred the former contrast between urban and non-urban land uses. The spatial complexity of urbanisation challenges current landscape-scale assessments based on land cover methods and standard Boole...

The spatial structure of cities, i.e. their composition, shape and degree of fragmentation or compactness, is a physical expression reflecting development efficiency. Identifying the evolution of urban systems in time and space is crucial towards sustainable urban development. In this paper, we assess the spatial structure of 194 cities from 1990 a...

Urban ecosystems perform a distinctive metabolism appropriating fundamental materials and energy resources from other ecosystems. This appropriation enables a productive circularity which sustains the material production of urban space: urbanisation. Upon entering the urban ecosystem, the material fluxes are processed by human labour to be consumed...

Rapid urbanization in African metropolises like the Greater Asmara Area, Eritrea, poses numerous environmental challenges, including soil sealing, loss of vegetation cover, threats to protected natural areas, and climate change, among others. Mapping and assessing ecosystem services, particularly analyzing their spatial and temporal distribution is...

Urban green spaces (UGS) are vital for providing cultural ecosystem services (CES) that enhance well-being in cities. CES are co-produced through human interactions with the environment and involve natural, built, human, and social capital. Assessing CES through textual social media reviews on platforms such as Google Maps, offers insights into the...

Context Ecosystem services are fundamental for the well-being of residents and are an important basis for making regional sustainable development decisions. Existing studies mainly capture ecosystem services perceived by residents through questionnaires, or quantify the provision of regional ecosystem services through economic evaluation and biophy...

Broadly accepted categorical differentiations of urbanisation understand cities as well-defined objects containing urban spaces in contrast to their hinterlands. However, urbanisation's multidimensional complexity challenges these approaches in the context of increasing social issues marked by rapid urban expansion, uneven development , ways of lif...

Understanding stakeholders’ differences in perceptions of ecosystem services (ES) is crucial for guiding ecological conservation and planning. However, the variations of ES perception amongst different types of residents in urbanizing areas along an urban-rural gradient are still poorly understood. Combining a questionnaire-based survey, redundancy...

Este trabajo presenta un análisis de las tendencias de desarrollo urbano del sector norte de Bogotá, en un área de 6930 hectáreas que incluye el Plan de Ordenamiento Zonal del Norte (POZN) y parte de la reserva natural Thomas Van der Hammen (RTVH). El plan propuesto por la Alcaldía mediante el Decreto 088 de 2017 intenta dar coherencia a un desarro...

Probogotá Región, desarrolló una metodología para la identificación, mapeo y análisis comparativo de los Servicios Ecosistémicos (SE), para determinar el impacto del desarrollo urbano sobre los SE. Este estudio fue liderado por el Dr. hábil Luis Inostroza y su equipo de trabajo, el cual fue probado en el suelo de expansión del norte de la ciudad. E...

La concepción del sistema urbano re-gional, así como la gestión del desarrollo urbano, requieren de un cambio fun-damental de paradigma en el siglo XXI. La sociedad ha experimentado cambios profundos en las formas de vida, de relación social y de relación con el entor-no natural y la biodiversidad durante el transcurso del siglo XX y los inicios de...

Im Rahmen eines Praxis-Workshops wurden anhand von vier Fallbeispielen Methoden und Instrumente zur Bewertung und Evaluation von Waldleistungen getestet. Das Evaluationsverfahren wurde in neun Schritte gegliedert: Diese reichen vom Kontext über die Analyse der Ressource bis hin zur Bekanntmachung der Vorteile für die Gesellschaft. Für jeden der neu...

Cities are highly complex, inter-connected social-ecological systems, encompassing social, built and natural/semi-natural components. They interact with their surrounding extra-urban areas at varying scales, from peri-urban and rural to global. Space is a valuable commodity in cities. However, in most instances, city planners tend to think about in...

The conception of the regional urban system and urban development management requires a fundamental paradigm shift in the 21st century. In the last hundred years, society has undergone profound changes in its ways of life and the way it relates to the natural environment and biodiversity. In addition, the high complexity of urban systems has render...

Urban areas are particularly vulnerable to climate change due to the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect, which can be mitigated by urban vegetation through shading and evapotranspiration. Nevertheless, there is still a lack of spatially explicit information on the cooling capacity of green infrastructure for most Latin American cities. In this study, w...

Context Understanding the relationship between ecosystem services and human well-being in rural areas of rapidly urbanizing watersheds is one of the core research questions of landscape sustainability science. It is important for poverty alleviation and forming related policies. However, there is insufficient investigation on the impacts of ecosyst...

The current climate change trend urges the application of efficient spatial planning to mitigate the effects of urbanization on local urban warming. Nevertheless, how urban temperatures respond to urban form changes inside cities is still insufficiently understood. In this paper, we explored the relationship between urban form and diurnal space-tim...

Ecosystem services (ES) are a fundamental component of well-being and sustainable urban development with tremendous potential to enhance urban planning. Recently, several studies have evaluated the environmental performance of urban plans using the ES approach. To strengthen this science-policy integration, it is still necessary to perform ES asses...

Chile es uno de los países con mayor nivel de urbanización de América Latina, lo que ha generado una serie de transformaciones territoriales. Estas, sumadas a una alta vulnerabilidad climática, acentúan las desigualdades socioambientales, segregación y diversas formas de exclusión social. En el presente capítulo, se discute cómo los procesos de des...

Urban expansion is expected to continue at a fast rate, precisely in peri-urban areas of developing countries surrounded by biodiversity hotspots. The need to assess and potentially restructure urban and environmental planning instruments becomes apparent in scenarios where urban expansion is difficult to manage. Indicators based on spatially expli...

Surface urban heat islands (SUHIs) are present in all cities, derived from their thermal properties. While looking at the spatiotemporal variability of land surface temperature (LST), there is still a gap in understanding patterns of change. In this paper, we analysed diurnal and nocturnal annual mean LST trends in continental (Beijing), temperate...

ContextUnderstanding the relationship between ecosystem services and human well-being in rural areas of rapidly urbanizing watersheds is one of the core research questions of landscape sustainability science. It is important for poverty alleviation and forming related policies. However, there is insufficient investigation on the impact of ecosystem...

Metabolism workshop. Exploring transformative material processes through the interactions between man and nature Rationale Understanding human involvement in transformative material processes is one of the most crucial aspects to face the current substantial global socio-environmental transformations. The word metabolism means transformation, chang...

Interested in presenting your work in one of the thirty-seven conference sessions? The call for abstracts for the 3rd ESP Europe conference 2021 is now reopened. The submission deadline is extended to 15 February 2021. Submit your proposal at Session B10 - Designing healthier cities through understanding demand for urban green and blue spaces, an...

While Ecosystem Services (ES) are crucial for sustaining human wellbeing, urban development can threaten their sustainable supply. Following recent EU directives, many countries in Europe are implementing laws and regulations to protect and improve ES at local and regional levels. However, urban planning regulations already consider mandatory compe...

Zoning is an important tool to regulate the use of land and to characterize built form over land, and thus to facilitate urban sustainability. Availability of reliable data is crucial for monitoring land use zoning, which contributes directly to the success of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in general, and SDG Goal 11 for sustainable citi...

Ecosystem functions are hierarchical bundles of ecological processes that sustain the internal organization and structure of ecosystems in space and time. These ecosystem functions are the fundamental set of interlinked energy/material/information exchange processes performed by the ecosystem. They can be understood as hierarchical aggregations of...

This proceedings book focuses on advanced technologies to monitor and model urban soils, vegetation and climate, including internet of things, remote sensing, express and non-destructive techniques. The Smart and Sustainable Cities (SSC) conference is a regular event, organized each second year in RUDN University (Russia) and providing a multidisci...

Cuan importante es la naturaleza para el desarrollo humano? A pesar del consenso existente en torno a la importancia de la naturaleza para el bienestar social, el siglo XX y el XXI se han caracterizado por una devastadora gestión de los todavía llamados “recursos naturales”. La depredación de nuestro capital natural ha sido amparada por aparatos di...

Urbanisation is one of the most challenging issues facing humankind in the 21st century. An increasing number of global issues and increasing scientific concerns about manifold ecological problems, including land degradation, pollution, climate change, loss of biodiversity, etc., can be linked to urbanisation. These negative ecological effects clea...

The present research datasets were processed for the article "The global homogenization of urban form. An assessment of 194 cities across time" [1]. They consist of land cover spatial layers, longitude and latitude point data and tabulated data with computed landscape metrics and the characterization of urban form of 194 cities for 1990 and 2015. C...

Evaluating the spatial relationship between the supply of and demand for cultural ecosystem services (CESs) in rapidly urbanizing watersheds is critical for landscape planning and the improvement of human well-being. However, few approaches can investigate relationships of multiple CESs in a spatially explicit way and involve different groups of st...

Ecosystem functions are hierarchical bundles of ecological processes that sustain the internal organization and structure of ecosystems in space and time. These ecosystem functions are the fundamental set of interlinked energy/material/information exchange processes performed by the ecosystem. They can be understood as hierarchical aggregations of...

In rapidly urbanizing watersheds with conflicts between socioeconomic development and ecological protection, understanding the relationship between ecosystem services (ESs) and human well-being is important for regional sustainability. However, quantifying their relationship over multiple scales remains challenging. We selected a typical rapidly ur...

Urban green space (UGS) provision is fundamental for the well-being of people living in cities and for sustainable urban development. Assessing, quantifying and monitoring UGS is relevant for researchers, practitioners and city administrations. To date, a great deal of research has been concerned with UGS provision and accessibility. Several studie...

El presente documento pretende iniciar una reflexión sobre los SEU en el ámbito de Latinoamérica. En este sentido, no pretende ser exhaustivo, sino más bien promover el inicio de una reflexión que deberá ser seguida por investigaciones y discusiones. Para efectos del presente documento, se entiende como SEU a aquellos servicios producidos en espaci...

The relationship between urban green, urban form and health remains unclear. This research explores health and urban green as well as urban structure as constituents of urban form. The objective was to develop a novel indicator (Neighbourhood Environmental Contribution, NEC) to analyse the spatial relationship between urban green and health (diabet...

One of the main drivers of peri-urbanization processes is the need for improving the quality of life of urban dwellers, by providing accessible and diverse cultural ecosystem services (CES). Thus a frequent ecosystem services (ES) trade-off emerges in peri-urban contexts between the need of protecting of green areas or protecting of food production...

Urban lakes are important freshwater resources for people and can have enormous ecological values. Understanding how different users perceive such benefits and what kind of conflicts can emerge from the multiple perceptions around the values of urban lakes can improve their management and maintain the provision of ecosystem services (ES). In this r...

In emergent economies, severe social inequalities can produce high exposure to deprived environmental conditions, affecting people's wellbeing. Urban parks can greatly help to increase the urban environmental quality by providing fundamental ecosystem services, such as local climate regulation, recreation and sense of place. Urban parks are, theref...

Urbanisation is a complex spatiotemporal process taking place across landscapes even in areas far beyond urban cores; therefore, directly and indirectly affecting the functions, processes and services of ecosystems. Urbanisation is a difficult process to monitor, quantify and plan. Landscape areas located outside of urban cores are heavily affected...

Sustainable urbanization remains one of the central challenges for South America. Cities of this region are expanding very fast and this impressive urban growth has a significant impact on the environment, on energy consumption, and on public health. This chapter explores the urban heat island (UHI) effect on the climate of Guayaquil, Lima, Antofag...

Ecosystem Services (ES) are classified into three main categories: regulating, provisioning and cultural. However, spatially explicit bundles of ES may not necessarily conform to these groups. In this study, bundles of ES were explored in a central European region to identify spatial associations. We estimated the provisions of 31 ES using the CORI...

Quantitative analyses of the influence of boundary lines on ecosystem services distributions remain rare. Approaches towards integrative assessments of green and grey landscape systems, particularly in cross-boundaries contexts, remain underdeveloped. This study aims to close that knowledge gap. This study was carried out in the cross-boundary land...

While urban systems are expanding at very fast rates all over the world, understanding their spatial development remains a complex and controversial issue, burdened with confusion in the literature. A common understanding of the spatial behavior of expanding urban systems needs robust conceptualization and empirical evidence. The physical growth of...

The impact of the increasing technomass (TM) on cooling demand in buildings is explored for cities in South America. The entangled double nature of the building–environment interrelation in an urban context is analyzed. The research question is whether an increase in the building density produces a superlinear increase of energy consumption at the...

Cities are dynamic environments that present complex spatial configurations. For decades remote sensing has allowed the representation and analysis of urban environments over the basis of different radiometric indexes. Recent technological advances in supplies and remote sensing techniques have encouraged better representations of the complex urban...

The rapid process of urban expansion has increasingly transformed natural and semi-natural areas (green areas) inside and in surroundings of cities into impervious surfaces and built-up areas. These land cover/land use changes (LCLUC) affect the potential of green infrastructure (GI) to provide fundamental ecosystem services (ES), like local climat...

Mankind’s quest for well-being results in continuous pressure to transform landscapes, with said transformation driven by land use changes, urbanization, production activity, and protective measures in addition to climate variability and other environmental drivers. The relationship between anthropogenic landscape changes and the provision of ecosy...

XLS file containing the homologation of the classes, policies and regulations with effect on landscapes. (XLSX)

XLS file containing the main calculations of the supply of ecosystem services. (XLSX)

The urban heat island phenomenon shows that the city changes the climate of the planet and affects it negatively by favouring the global warming. Urban morphology and city metabolism defines this behaviour. The city of Valparaíso, Chile, located in coastal Mediterranean climate in southern hemisphere is a city with around 295,000 inhabitants. In th...

Although Urban Heat Island (UHI) is a fundamental effect modifying the urban climate, being widely studied, the relative weight of the parameters involved in its generation is still not clear. This paper investigates the hierarchy of importance of eight parameters responsible for UHI intensity in the Mediterranean context. Sensitivity analyses have...

Urban heat island effect often produces an increase of overheating sensation inside of buildings. To evacuate this heat, the current use of air conditioning increases the energy consumption of buildings. As a good alternative, natural ventilation is one of the best strategies to obtain indoor comfort conditions, even in summer season, if buildings...

The urban heat island (UHI) effect is constantly increasing the energy consumption of buildings, especially in summer periods. The energy gap between the estimated energy performance - often simulated without considering UHI - and the real operational consumption is especially relevant for institutional buildings, where the cooling needs are in gen...

The urban heat island (UHI) effect is constantly increasing the energy consumption of buildings, especially in summer periods. The energy gap between the estimated energy performance - often simulated without considering UHI - and the real operational consumption is especially relevant for institutional buildings, where the cooling needs are in gen...

This data article presents files supporting calculation for Urban Heat Island (UHI) inclusion in Building Performance Simulation (BPS). Methodology is used in the research article “From urban climate to energy consumption. Enhancing building performance simulation by including the urban heat island effect” (M. Palme, L. Inostroza, G. Villacreses, A...

Following EU-directives, many countries in Europe implemented laws and regulations for protecting and improving the natural environment at the local and regional level. Mandatory compensation for the loss of nature is often restricted to replacing urban green by improving rural or peri-urban green spaces. When looking at real world situations ocurr...

Cities are dissipative structures. As such, cities generate heat, a phenomenon known as urban heat island (UHI). Even though the UHI is one of the most relevant effects of urbanization on urban climate, up-to-date methodologies to include it in the estimation of buildings’ energy consumption are still scarce. During the last 30 years, different met...

Dryland ecosystems are highly vulnerable to environmental changes. Monitoring is vital in order to evaluate their response to fluctuating rainfall and temperature patterns for long-term ecosystem safeguarding. Monitoring of long term changes of normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and climate variables are fundamental for better understand...

Enhanced green infrastructure (GI) in urban areas, such as green roofs, parks and green spaces can make a significant contribution to enhancing the provision of fundamental ecosystem services (ES), through nature-based solutions. These positive effects include increasing the interception capacity due to increasing vegetation cover, increasing of st...

Informal urban development (IUD) is a key driver of urbanization in Latin America, which is challenging urban planning and governance. According to the last national census of 2010, in Argentina more than a fifth of households of the Greater Buenos Aires Area (GBA) live in inadequate housing conditions, in the most densely populated urban agglomera...

Human activities are continuously expanding at a global scale and having an increasing effect on the remaining natural ecosystems in remote areas, such as the Magellan Region of southern Patagonia, Chile. In addition to extensive livestock holdings, aquaculture and tourism are advancing into formerly undisturbed areas, and insufficient information...

Climate change will worsen the high levels of urban vulnerability in Latin American cities due to specific environmental stressors. Some impacts of climate change, such as high temperatures in urban environments have not yet been addressed through adaptation strategies, which are based on poorly supported data. These impacts remain outside the scop...

XLS file containing the PCA calculations for sensitivity. (XLS)

XLS file containing the PCA calculations for adaptive capacity. (XLS)

XLS file containing the sensitivity analysis for adaptive capacity and HVI. (XLS)

Santiago the capital of Chile has been experiencing a tremendous and fast urban development, adding more than 1,300 hectares per year to the continuous urban area. Under a generally weak urban development legal framework a portion of this fast urban development is informal, contrary to the common belief of authorities and planners, taking place out...