Maximising ecosystem services in urban environments (MEaSURE)

城市环境是地球上大多数人的家园，因此确保这些系统提供健康、富有成效和有弹性的环境至关重要。绿色基础设施——我们将其定义为多功能绿色空间和其他绿色特征的网络——是城市系统的关键组成部分，也是城市生物多样性的主要储存库。但是，我们如何管理绿色基础设施，以最大限度地发挥这些特征给人类和更广泛的生态系统功能带来的好处呢？在这里，我们的重点是获得与绿色基础设施相关的多样性的更好的预测性理解，可以优化以增强生态系统服务。生物多样性被广泛认为是多种生态系统功能（即生态系统多功能性）的关键驱动因素，支撑着为人类提供众多生态系统服务的基础，以及不受欢迎的危害。因此，对生物多样性的操纵具有相当大的潜力，可以显著改善我们如何构建和管理工程生态系统和城市生态系统。阻碍我们利用城市地区生物多样性利益的一个主要知识缺口是理解城市环境中绿色基础设施的特定属性如何影响生物多样性-生态系统多功能关系。这些知识对于城市绿色基础设施的设计和管理非常重要，可以最大限度地在更广泛的城市景观中提供生态系统服务。此外，景观形态和生物多样性影响生态系统服务和减轻损害的机制在不同的尺度上运作，我们缺乏对这些机制在城市景观中如何运作和规模的理解。知识上的另一个差距是，城市形态的多样性如何与邻近的城郊和农村形态的多样性相互作用，从而影响城市景观中的生态系统服务和损害。在这里，我们解决了这些知识空白，以了解如何利用生物多样性在不同尺度的城市景观中增强生态系统的多功能性。我们关注碳捕获、循环和储存、城市冷却和蓄水能力的生态系统服务，以及温室气体排放、病原体流行和蜱传病原体的危害；这些服务和损害与绿色基础设施有着内在的联系，与生物多样性的联系有着既定的机制基础。我们将把生物多样性-生态系统多功能性关系的知识整合到一个建模框架中，该框架将用于创建一个基于网络的规划工具，以确定规划情景如何影响城市生态系统的多功能性。我们的研究结果将有助于建立促进机制，重点关注城市土地利用和绿色基础设施规划，以增强地方规模的绿色基础设施干预对更广泛的景观尺度过程和城市生态系统弹性的贡献。

Urban environments are home to the majority of people on the planet and so ensuring these systems provide healthy, productive and resilient environments is critical. Green infrastructure - which we define as a network of multi-functional green space and other green features - is a key component of urban systems and the main reservoirs of much urban biodiversity. But how do we manage green infrastructure to maximise the benefits these features bring to humans and wider ecosystem functioning? Here we focus on gaining a better predictive understanding of diversity associated with green infrastructure can be optimised to enhance ecosystem services.Biodiversity is widely recognised to be a key driver of multiple ecosystem functions (i.e. ecosystem multifunctionality), underpinning the provision of numerous ecosystem services for humanity, as well as undesirable disservices. Manipulation of biodiversity therefore has considerable potential to significantly improve how we construct and manage engineered and urban ecosystems. A major gap in knowledge hampering our ability to harness the benefits of biodiversity in urban areas is understanding how attributes particular to green infrastructure in urban environments affect biodiversity-ecosystem multifunctionality relationships. This knowledge is important for the design and management of urban green infrastructure to maximise ecosystem service provision in wider urban landscapes. Moreover, the mechanisms by which landscape form and biodiversity influence ecosystem services and mitigate against disservices operate at different scales, and we lack understanding of how these mechanisms operate and scale in urban landscapes. A further gap in knowledge is how the diversity of urban forms interact with the diversity of neighbouring peri-urban and rural forms to affect ecosystem services and disservices in urban landscapes. Here we address these gaps in knowledge to understand how biodiversity can be used to enhance ecosystem multifunctionality in urban landscapes at contrasting scales. We focus on ecosystem services of carbon capture, cycling and storage, urban cooling, and water holding capacity, and disservices of greenhouse gas emissions, pathogen prevalence, and tick-borne pathogens; these services and disservices are intrinsically linked to green infrastructure and there is an established mechanistic basis for a link to biodiversity. We will integrate knowledge of biodiversity-ecosystem multifunctionality relationships into a modelling framework that will be used to create a web-based planning tool to determine how planning scenarios affect urban ecosystem multifunctionality. Our findings will contribute to the development of enabling mechanisms, with a focus on urban land use and green infrastructure planning, to enhance the contribution made by local scale green infrastructure interventions to wider landscape scale processes and the resilience of urban ecosystems.