With over half the world’s population living in cities and urbanization expanding every year, urban systems can act as models for understanding both ecosystem services (ES) and disservices (EDS) in a developing world. Within these landscapes, urban ecological infrastructure (UEI) and residential landscapes affect the ecosystem services that people experience. While the services these spaces provide vary with biotic and abiotic elements, commonly perceived ecosystem services include cultural (e.g. aesthetic value) and supporting (e.g. benefits to biodiversity) services. Yet people’s evaluations of ES and EDS are subjective and may vary with local landscape attributes as well as the characteristics of individuals. Since little work has examined subjective evaluations of ES and EDS, we focus on perceptions and tradeoffs regarding biotic and aesthetic services. To better understand drivers of ES/EDS perceptions, we investigate how social factors and local environmental attributes shape perceived ecosystem services. Specifically, we used the 2017 Phoenix Area Social Survey to measure how 496 individuals perceived the ecosystem services in their neighborhood as well as the social and demographic factors of these individuals. We then investigated how this information varied based on individual experiences with land-cover, UEI, and species diversity metrics.
Results/Conclusions
Individual respondents' ecological worldviews, demographics, and proximity to urban ecological infrastructure significantly influenced perceptions of ecosystem services and ecosystem disservices. Respondents who lived within wealthier neighborhoods near desert parks were more likely to agree that they experienced both natural beauty and desirable biota, whereas respondents in lower income areas with higher Hispanic/Latinx populations were more likely to report aesthetic nuisances and undesirable biota. Perceptions of desirable biota were also strongly linked to local land-cover, with respondents who lived in areas surrounded by higher levels of natural vegetation perceiving more desirable biota. In contrast, respondents in areas with more bare soil and urban mixture, defined as a mixture of constructed materials, paved surfaces, and fragmented vegetation, perceived more undesirable biota. This work highlights the importance of evaluating ecosystem services and disservices within landscape features since the perception of the service or disservice may depend on proximity and familiarity with the urban ecological infrastructure providing the service/disservice. Our findings are especially relevant to planners who seek to increase ecosystem services within cities, because the perception of these services will vary by individual experiences.