Ecosystems support and enhance human life through providing ecosystem services. The use of ecosystem services changes over time, as environmental conditions and people’s lifestyles change. The process of urbanisation causes fundamental physical changes to ecosystems, both within cities but also in their hinterlands. Simultaneously, people’s lifestyles change as they move into cities and adopt urban practices and diets. Here we analyse changes in natural vegetation cover, and people’s interactions with ecosystem services, over a period of around 50 years.
Singapore is an island city-state in tropical Southeast Asia. The country experienced rapid urbanisation through the second half of the twentieth century. To quantify changes in coverage of natural and semi-natural ecosystems, we analysed the land cover of Singapore between 1945 and 2018. We compared data extracted from a historical topographic map, with modern remote sensing of high-resolution satellite imagery. To quantify changes in people’s experiences and use of ecosystem services, we performed a semi-structured interview to ask members of the public about their childhood memories of nature. We asked questions relating to indicators of use of 12 ecosystem services. We compared two groups of respondents; those born before 1960 (pre-1960), and those born between 1989-1999.
Results/Conclusions
The overall area of semi-natural vegetation cover increased by 16.3 km2 from 148.9 km2 in 1945 to 165.2 km2 in 2018. However, this relatively small net change was masked high turnover in the natural vegetation cover, which expanded in 111 km2 but was lost from 94 km2. Natural vegetation was lost in many coastal areas, and the area of mangrove forest has greatly reduced. Conversely, large areas of secondary forest have regrown inland and in the west of the island. The type of natural vegetation cover, as well as its ecological history, are important in determining the value for biodiversity and in supporting regulating, provisioning, and cultural services that impact human wellbeing.
From the survey of people’s memories, the two respondent groups recalled significantly different uses of ecosystem services. A higher proportion of the pre-1960 respondents reported using provisioning and regulating services, and a higher proportion of 1989-1999 respondents using cultural services. This study thus demonstrates that urbanisation can decrease people’s direct reliance on ecosystems to provide raw materials, while leading to greater appreciation of cultural benefits including education and nature recreation.