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Grasslands are widespread elements of urban greenspace providing recreational, psychological and aesthetic benefits to city residents. Two urban grassland types of contrasting management dominate urban greenspaces: frequently mown, species-poor short-cut lawns and less intensively managed, near-natural tall-grass meadows. The higher conservation value of tall-grass meadows makes management interventions such as converting short-cut lawns into tall-grass meadows a promising tool for urban biodiversity conservation. The societal success of such interventions, however, depends on identifying the values urban residents assign to different types of urban grasslands, and how these values translate to attitudes towards greenspace management. Using 2027 questionnaires across 19 European cities, we identify the assigned values that correlate with people's personal greenspace use and their preferences for different types of urban grasslands to determine how these values relate to the agreement with a scenario of converting 50% of their cities’ short-cut lawns into tall-grass meadows. We found that most people assigned nature-related values, such as wildness, to tall-grass meadows and utility-related values, such as recreation, to short-cut lawns. Positive value associations of wildness and species richness with tall-grass meadows, and social and nature-related greenspace activities, positively correlated with agreeing to convert short-cut lawns into tall-grass meadows. Conversely, disapproval of lawn conversion correlated with positive value associations of cleanliness and recreation potential with short-cut lawns. Here, people using greenspaces for nature-related activities were outstandingly positive about lawn conversion. The results show that the plurality of values assigned to different types of urban grasslands should be considered in urban greenspace planning. For example, tall-grass meadows could be managed to also accommodate the values associated with short-cut lawns, such as tidiness and recreation potential, to support their societal acceptance., The work was supported by the Institut Municipal de Parcs i Jardins of the Barcelona city Council, the European Union FP7 collaborative project Green Surge (Leonie K Fischer; FP7-ENV.2013.6.2-5-603567, Grant Agreement No. 603567), the Kone Foundation (personal grant to Jussi Lampinen), Ramon y Cajal fellowship to Josu Alday (RYC-2016-20528), and the grants NKFI KH 133038 & KKP 133839 (both Balázs Deák) and NKFI FK 124404 (Orsolya Valkó).

Combining socio-cultural valuations of ecosystem services with ecological and monetary assessments is critical to informing decision making with an integrative and multi-pronged approach. This study examined differences in the perceptions of ecosystem service supply and diversity across eight major ecosystem types in Spain and scrutinized the social and ecological factors shaping these perceptions. First, we implemented 1932 face-to-face questionnaires among local inhabitants to assess perceptions of ecosystem service supply. Second, we created an ecosystem service diversity index to measure the perceived diversity of services considering agroecosystems, Mediterranean mountains, arid systems, two aquatic continental systems, coastal ecosystems and two urban ecosystems. Finally, we examined the influence of biophysical, socio-demographic and institutional factors in shaping ecosystem service perceptions. Overall, cultural services were the most widely perceived, followed by provisioning and regulating services. Provisioning services were most strongly associated with agroecosystems, mountains and coastal systems, whereas cultural services were associated with urban ecosystems and regulating services were specifically linked with agroecosystems, mountains and urban recreational areas. The highest service diversity index values corresponded to agroecosystems, mountains and wetlands. Our results also showed that socio-demographic factors, such as place of origin (urban vs. rural) and educational level, as well as institutional factors, such as management and access regimes, shaped the perception of ecosystem services. © 2020 by the authors. Funding: Funding for the development of this research was provided by: the Andalusian Center for the Assessment of Global Change (CAESCG) (GLOCHARID project), the County Council of Biscay and the Basque Government by providing funds for this research, IMIDRA research Project Assessment of Ecosystem Services provided by Agroecosystems (FP16-ECO), funds of the European Union EU FP7 project OpenNESS (Grant Agreement No. 308428), funds of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 81819, by the project entitled: Co-design of novel contract models for innovative agri-environmental-climate measures and for valorisation of environmental public goods, and SAVIA (Sowing Alternatives for Agro-ecological Innovation) project funded by R&D projects for young researchers at the Autonomous University of Madrid (ref SI1/PJI/2019-00444). E.O.-R. has been funded by Juan de la Cierva Incorporation Fellowship of the Ministry of Science Innovation and Universities (IJCI-2017-34334). I.I.-A. acknowledges financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Sciences, Innovation and Universities, through the “Juan de la Cierva-Incorporación” program (grant IJCI-2017-33405) and the “María de Maeztu” program for Units of Excellence (MDM-2015-0552).

In the last decades, some European cities have undergone important changes in search of a more sustainable development. This is the case for the city of Bilbao (Bizkaia, Basque Country), where a Greenbelt has been maintained surrounding the urban areas allowing the periurban areas to deliver ecosystem services (ES) to society. However, the role of the different ecosystems in the provision of ES is not the same, which can lead to conflicts among them. The aim of this study is to analyze the synergies and trade-offs among the eight most important ES in the Bilbao Metropolitan Greenbelt (BMG) to orient their management strategies towards more multifunctional landscapes. We mapped the ES and overlapped them looking for the most relevant areas for the provision of multiple ES and areas that are mostly lacking ES provision. We identify also existing ES trade-offs and synergies between ES using correlations so that managers can prioritize preservation efforts of land use types in the rest of the area. The results show that provisioning ES had trade-offs with regulating and cultural ES and the latter showed synergies between them. The former are mainly delivered by semi-natural ecosystems, while regulating and cultural ES are delivered mainly by natural ecosystems. Moreover, the most relevant areas for the provision of multiple ES were proposed as potential components of a Green Infrastructure (GI). Their identification and ES bundles could help decision-makers to orient their management strategies towards sustainability in metropolitan areas. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the Departments of Environment and Education of the Basque Government; and from the Department of Environment of the County Council of Biscay.

11 p. Ecosystem service assessments have increasingly been used to support environmental management policies, mainly based on biophysical and economic indicators. However, few studies have coped with the social-cultural dimension of ecosystem services, despite being considered a research priority. We examined how ecosystem service bundles and trade-offs emerge from diverging social preferences toward ecosystem services delivered by various types of ecosystems in Spain. We conducted 3,379 direct face-to-face questionnaires in eight different case study sites from 2007 to 2011. Overall, 90.5% of the sampled population recognized the ecosystem's capacity to deliver services. Formal studies, environmental behavior, and gender variables influenced the probability of people recognizing the ecosystem's capacity to provide services. The ecosystem services most frequently perceived by people were regulating services; of those, air purification held the greatest importance. However, statistical analysis showed that socio-cultural factors and the conservation management strategy of ecosystems (i.e., National Park, Natural Park, or a non-protected area) have an effect on social preferences toward ecosystem services. Ecosystem service trade-offs and bundles were identified by analyzing social preferences through multivariate analysis (redundancy analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis). We found a clear trade-off among provisioning services (and recreational hunting) versus regulating services and almost all cultural services. We identified three ecosystem service bundles associated with the conservation management strategy and the rural-urban gradient. We conclude that socio-cultural preferences toward ecosystem services can serve as a tool to identify relevant services for people, the factors underlying these social preferences, and emerging ecosystem service bundles and trade-offs. Funding for the Andalusian case studies came from the Department of Innovation, Science, and Enterprise of Andalusian Government (project P08-RNM-03945) and the Ministry of the Environment and Rural and Marine Affairs of Spain (project 018/2009). The study of the Conquense Drove Road was funded by the Ministry of the Environment and Rural and Marine Affairs of Spain (project #079/RN08/02.1). The Bilbao Metropolitan Greenbelt study was funded by the Department of Education, University and Research of the Basque Government through the doctoral grant received by I. Casado-Arzuaga (BFI09.231), and the Environment Department of the Regional Government of Bizkaia through the project "Millennium Ecosystem Assessment in Bizkaia.'' This paper was further supported by the Biodiversity Foundation through the Spanish Millennium Ecosystem Assessment project (http://www.ecomilenio.es/). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.