Development of Methods for Urban Ecosystem Carbon Budgeting and Its Contribution to Urban Sustainability

Dear Colleagues,

The importance of urban ecosystems for human health and well-being, including their contributions to urban sustainability, including sequestering atmospheric carbon into vegetation and soils, has only recently started to be appreciated. National inventories of ecosystem carbon stocks in soils and vegetation have omitted urban areas, assuming that they are unimportant.  Recent citywide studies have overturned these assumptions, revealing the concentrations of organic carbon in ecosystems per unit area of cities often exceed those found in their agricultural hinterlands. The stocks of organic carbon in trees, and especially in soils (including under roads and paving) are important not only in mitigating climate change by sequestering atmospheric CO₂, but also in supporting and delivering multiple additional benefits to urban sustainability and human well-being. These include retaining water and nutrients, providing energy sources for organisms like earthworms that increase storm water infiltration, and supporting urban ecosystems, including tree biomass, which improves air quality and provides urban shade and cooling.   

Methods for determining accurate carbon budgets for urban ecosystems above and below ground, and at spatial scales from small gardens up to large urbanized regions, have advanced rapidly, with their strengths and limitations starting to become clear.  Urban landscapes are inherently spatially complex due to extreme fragmentation and highly varied land use, land covers and histories, requiring carefully developed sampling strategies if spatially representative data are to be generated.   Furthermore, measurements of ecosystem carbon stocks and carbon sequestration are complicated by the multiple forms and sources of the element in urban soils, including from organic matter inputs from pre-urban and current ecosystems, fossil and thermally altered carbon sources.  The latter include coal dust, soot from fossil fuel burning, charred wood and biomass, particles from wear of tyres, tars from asphalt, and inorganic carbon present in carbonate rocks such as limestone chippings. Furthermore, carbon dioxide can also be actively sequestered into carbonates formed from the weathering of cements, for example in building rubble, and silicates in steel slags.

For this Special Issue, we invite research contributions and syntheses that evaluate and improve methods, develop new perspectives and approaches, and provide new data that address knowledge gaps to improve the quantification and evaluation of the present and future potential contributions of carbon storage in urban ecosystems for urban sustainability.  We particularly welcome submissions that further the understanding of regional to global scale contributions of urban areas to ecosystem carbon stocks and sequestration; effects of sealing and capping; characterization and source apportionment of soil carbon pools laterally and vertically in soil profiles; and use of high spatial resolution remote sensed data and ground-based surveys to determine ecosystem carbon stocks in vegetation and soils.

Prof. Dr. Jonathan R. Leake
Dr. Jill Edmondson
Guest Editors

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• urban ecosystems
• ecosystem carbon storage
• urban sustainability