Spatial opportunities and constraints for green infrastructure network design

Spencer, D., Marques, A., Veerkamp, C., van der Marel, M., Verburg, P., Namasivayam, A.S., Di Marco, M., Jung, M., Kujala, H., O'Connor, L., Visconti, P., & Schipper, A. (2024). Spatial opportunities and constraints for green infrastructure network design. Pensoft Publishers 10.3897/arphapreprints.e123365.

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Abstract

Opportunity costs, the foregone economic benefits from alternative activities or uses of a resource on a particular site, represent one of multiple options to approximate costs of nature conservation and can be used alongside biodiversity and ecosystem services data in spatial conservation prioritisation analyses. However, such cost data are not yet available across Europe. We created a European opportunity cost layer for productive (arable, pastoral and forestry) and urban lands at a spatial resolution of 1 km2, using land, resource, and residential rents. We mapped the opportunity costs of productive lands based on (sub)national land and resource rent data, which we allocated to the grid level based on gridded agricultural and forestry production data combined with country-specific commodity prices. We converted empirical data on property rents specific to housing type and city into area-standardised and city-specific rents and then applied these values to all cities and urban area within the respective country. When multiple cities from a single country were represented in the empirical dataset, a mean value of all the corresponding cities was used.

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