Publications
NIBIOs employees contribute to several hundred scientific articles and research reports every year. You can browse or search in our collection which contains references and links to these publications as well as other research and dissemination activities. The collection is continously updated with new and historical material.
2025
Authors
Katrine Marie Brynildsrud Peter Horvath Michael Angeloff Wenche Dramstad Adam Eindride Naas Kerstin Potthoff Anders BrynAbstract
Expanding cities and urban densification is one of the major threats to biodiversity, ecosystem services and human welfare. Using Oslo, the capital city of Norway, as a case study this study addresses the following questions: (i) What vegetation changes have occurred between 1980s and 2021 and to what extent? (ii) What are the potential consequences of documented changes for biodiversity and other functions of green spaces? (iii) What future direction is the present development plan aiming for? To answer these questions, detailed vegetation maps (1:10 000) of Oslo from around 1980s were remapped in situ in 2021. We present results on land cover transformations, area statistics, and analyses of ecological impacts using landscape metrics. Our results document that large areas previously covered by vegetation types and cultivated land have been lost to urban densification. Housing dominated the new use. This loss of areas with vegetation types will affect ecosystem diversity negatively. On average, the total area and the mean patch area of each vegetation type decreased, whereas the mean Euclidean nearest-neighbor distance increased. These changes have lowered connectivity and increased fragmentation. Despite explicitly stated aims, previous efforts to reduce loss of areas with high biodiversity and maintain urban green spaces have not succeeded, and the planned future urban development indicates that a further decrease will follow in the next decades.
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Urban agriculture is often considered a tool to increase the economic, social and environmental sustainability of cities and city food systems. However, sustainability is difficult to measure, resulting in debate about how sustainable urban agriculture truly is. There is therefore a lack of incentive to promote urban agriculture or protect existing initiatives that are threatened by development pressure on urban land. Monitoring the sustainability impact of urban agriculture could provide evidence and enable politicians and decision makers to make informed decisions about whether and where to prioritise different forms of urban agriculture above competing interests. We used case examples from five European cities to identify the challenges involved in monitoring urban agriculture, from selecting indicators and gathering data, to using the results. We found large differences in approach in terms of what topics to monitor and who was responsible, who gathered the data and when, what data was recorded and how they were stored, and how findings were disseminated or published. Based on these experiences, we recommend stronger involvement of existing interest groups and educational institutions in monitoring urban agriculture, and promotion of convenient tools for data collection by citizen science and for long-term data storage.
2024
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