Urban forests’ recreation and habitat potentials in China: A nationwide synthesis

Urban forests are important landscape components in cities around the world that offer multiple functionality, thereby serve as a nature-based solution to offsetting negative social-ecological effects brought by urbanization. While the recreational function, as a traditional focus of urban forests, has been primarily emphasized in Chinese cities, the emerging ecological civilization, as a national guiding institution, has gradually brought ecological dimension into urban forest construction and management. By combining statistical data and satellite image data covering 31 key-cities in mainland China, we attempt to quantitatively analyze the transition of urban forests with regard to two intertwined, critical dimensions: recreational potential (proxied by public park space per capita) and habitat potential (proxied by the percentage of core habitat that is not subject to significant disturbances and thus able to effectively maintain the ecological functionality of urban forest patches), to unveil possible synergies or tradeoffs between these two critical aspects for the period of 2011−2018. We found that overall urban forests’ recreation potential has increased, but their habitat potential has decreased. Economic growth is positively associated with recreation potential, but negatively associated with habitat potential. Results of this study revealed that the institutionalization of “ecological civilization” paradigm in China has not yet been successfully taken into urban forest domain. This calls for urban landscape policy and planning directed towards fostering synergistic effects between urban forests’ recreational function and habitat potential in order to essentially reconcile citizens’ recreational uses and the resilience of cities as complex socioecological systems. In this vein, the development of urban forest, as a visualized form of the mainstream yet subtle ecological civilization, can be further geared towards multi-functionality.