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Pedestrian-friendly urban structures motivate people to use active modes of mobility and walk instead of using their car. Active mobility is associated with health-promoting benefits and assumed to support neighbourhood-based social interaction. In this context, walkability assessment tools help urban and transport planning to identify deficiencies for the walkability of urban neighbourhoods and use the results to work towards improvements. The results contribute towards the establishment of indicators to measure development and planning targets with respect to the walkability of urban neighbourhoods and continuous monitoring over time. Based on a newly developed and free available GIS-measurement tool this paper assesses the walkability of the 16 most populated Germany cities at a small scale. The lowest average walkability can be found in the city of Dortmund, while Frankfurt am Main shows the highest values. The paper discusses the methodology and the results for the 16 cities and uses short portrayals of the town planning history and pedestrian infrastructure in Dortmund and Frankfurt am Main to explain possible reasons for the differences in the measurement results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a scientifically credible and practically relevant set of indicators and methods to assess and evaluate ecosystem services of relevance for land use and landscape planning. The research questions are (i) to identify suitable ecosystem services, indicators, and methods, and (ii) to assess the proposed indicators regarding the respective data availability and assessment effort. The region of Frankfurt/Rhein-Main (Germany) serves as the case study. The methods include the synthesis of a specifically adapted list of ecosystem services indicators based on relevant prior research and an expert-based and application-oriented evaluation. The proposed list for the region of Frankfurt/Rhein-Main contains 27 ecosystemservices, with one or more associated indicators each. The evaluation reveals that metropolitan regions in Germany usually provide sufficient data to assess almost all ecosystem services. The assessment effort differs, but is generally moderate. The paper concludes with recommendations for practical application in the Frankfurt region and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]