BioCiTrees · An integrative understanding of the role that urban trees plays for people and nature
Horizon Europe — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2024-03-18 → 2026-03-17
- EU contribution
- €181,153
- Participants
- 2
- Scheme
- HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
An integrative understanding of the role that urban trees plays for people and nature
Cities face increasing pressure to optimise living conditions while ensuring a high quality of life. Urban trees provide multiple benefits, including air quality regulation, recreational opportunities, and habitat for biodiversity. Designing green urban areas that maximise these benefits requires understanding the mechanisms by which trees deliver them. However, these mechanisms remain under debate due to potential trade-offs among ecosystem services. A given vegetation composition may enhance air purification while reducing other benefits. In addition, citizens’ perceptions and preferences for tree species may not align with those that maximise ecosystem services, introducing trade-offs between ecological performance and social acceptance. The overarching goal of this project was to identify combinations of tree traits that maximise benefits to people while being appreciated by citizens, supporting evidence-based recommendations for co-designing urban green areas. The specific objectives were to: (1) identify mechanisms by which urban trees provide air purification and habitat for insects; (2) test mechanistic models of these benefits under global change; and (3) identify trade-offs between ecosystem service provision and citizens’ preferences.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
There is a huge pressure on cities to build robust urban ecosystems in a way that can withstand global change while providing good living conditions for citizens. The accomplishment of this goal is essential to ensure an equitable future maintaining the benefits of nature’s contributions to people (NCP) that the urban green infrastructures (UGI, i.e., trees, parks and urban forests) provide. To achieve this challenge, we first must identify which type of UGI better adapt to present and future conditions and hence increase its long-term ecosystem functionality and resilience. Thus, there is an urgent need of empirical research to optimize UGI functions and NCP, which are still insufficient. Additionally, society’s preferences for given UGIs may not coincide with UGIs that maximize nature’s benefits to people. This could add new trade-offs between social and ecological dimensions of those benefits. The main objective of BioCiTrees is to build mechanistic models testing which species maximize different NCP (i.e., air purification and insect biodiversity support) while exploring trade-offs between society’s preference for certain UGIs and the provision of those contributions. For this, BioCiTrees will apply trait-based approaches to identify key traits and community functional components that maximize the benefits of those contributions in the context of global change, an evidence that is lacking. Moreover, this project will develop a survey to identify different stakeholders’ preferences for certain UGIs, providing support for establishing targets to co-develop UGIs taking cultural values into account. BioCiTrees will help to fill a major gap in our understanding of the underlaying mechanisms controlling NCP in urban ecosystems so that we can use the full potential of the UGI for the benefit of urban citizens while tackling global challenges, a priority of the Horizon Europe and the EU Green Deal.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
Links
- View on CORDIS
- DOI: 10.3030/101105829
- https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/documents/downloadPublic?documentIds=080166e51210644a&appId=PPGMS
- https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/documents/downloadPublic?documentIds=080166e52949dda5&appId=PPGMS
Data: CORDIS, © European Union