A methodological framework for the assessment of regulating and recreational ecosystem services in urban parks under heat and drought conditions

Climate change, urbanisation and demographic change affect urban areas and pose a range of health-related challenges to urban residents, including heat waves, drought periods, air pollution and densification processes. Urban green spaces provide ecosystem services that can help to mitigate the effects of these challenges. Urban green spaces such as parks, urban gardens and street trees regulate the microclimate and buffer noise as well as a variety of air pollutants. Parks promote physical activity, relaxation and social interaction. The potential to provide these services might be limited during extreme weather events such as heat waves and drought periods. With this experience-based perspective paper, we introduce an interdisciplinary project that consists of multi-method field campaigns to assess the potential of urban parks to provide regulating and recreational ecosystem services in the context of the 2018 and 2019 heat and drought periods in Germany. We highlight that multi-method field campaigns that combine sensor-based environmental measurements with social science approaches, including visitor observations, counts, and questionnaire surveys, are highly useful when urbanisation and climate change-related challenges must be effectively addressed in the context of the complex socio-ecological systems of a city. Based on our hands-on experiences, we provide recommendations for local urban green space planning and outline prospects for future research. (Figure presented.).