Fakultät für Architektur und Landschaft
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- ItemEcosystem Services and Urban Planning: A Review of the Contribution of the Concept to Adaptation in Urban Areas(Basel : MDPI, 2022) Marques, Andresa Ledo; Alvim, Angélica Tanus Benatti; Schröder, JörgThe effects of climate change have a negative impact on urban areas and projections indicate these impacts will worsen in the coming years. In this context, cities need to adapt to the adverse effects of climate change. Potential solutions proposed in the literature for this adaptation include the use of Ecosystem Services. However, of the large volume of publications, few articles provide a structured analysis of the contribution and use of the concept in urban planning and adaptation to climate change. The objective of the present study was to review the literature on the subject and provide a structured analysis of the state of the art, main authors, countries, and references addressing the topic, together with key concepts emerging from this research, and challenges for future studies. Thus, a hybrid method of bibliometric analysis and in-depth reading of key articles held on the Web of Science electronic database was applied. The results revealed a growing scientific interest in the subject, a trend of greater interdisciplinarity in research, use of different evaluation methods, both economic and non-economic, and a systemic perspective that approaches sustainability not only as an environmental problem, but as a complex phenomenon.
- ItemCoastSnap – Experiences from the Case Study Langwarder Groden in Germany(Hannover : Institutionelles Repositorium der Leibniz Universität Hannover, 2025-06-27) Kempa, Daniela; Schiffmann, Conrad; Schönebeck, Jan-MichaelCoastSnap is a citizen science initiative that engages the public in coastal monitoring by encouraging them to take photos of specific coastlines from fixed, designated locations. Due to its promising implementation on coastlines all around the world, CoastSnap was also used as part of the Gute Küste Niedersachsen real-worl-laboratory (GKN RwL). The main task was to monitor the daily dynamics of the tidal water influx, sediment movement and vegetation changes in the salt marshes of the restoration measure in the Langwarder Groden in Butjadingen. In this working paper we present the results of a survey among the CoastSnap users at Langwarder Groden. It revealed a high level of public interest in scientific research and a willingness to contribute with some options for improvements. Based on the results we summarize 5 key findings to support the performance of CoastSnap stations in Germany and elsewhere.
- ItemDeep learning modeling in electricity load forecasting: Improved accuracy by combining DWT and LSTM(Amsterdam [u.a.] : Elsevier, 2024) Nabavi, Seyed Azad; Mohammadi, Sahar; Motlagh, Naser Hossein; Tarkoma, Sasu; Geyer, PhilippForecasting electricity load plays a vital role in the planning and management of sustainable power systems, considering the multifaceted impacts of social, economic, technical, environmental, and cultural factors on electricity consumption. Addressing this complexity requires the development of robust models capable of handling high levels of nonlinearity. In this study, we used four machine learning-based methods for forecasting short to long-term electricity load. Electricity load Data were collected from the Iranian Grid Management Company (IGMC) online electricity data and German electricity market data platform. Environmental factors (ambient temperature, cloud cover, solar radiation, precipitation), social events (vacations, festivals), and time series features (Hour Lag, Day Lag, Week Lag, Year Lag) were considered as input variables. The methods include Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), a combination of LSTM and Discrete Wavelet Transformation (DWT-LSTM), Nonlinear Auto-Regressive with eXogenous inputs (NARX), and Support Vector Machine (SVM) regressor. We apply these methods to forecast electricity load under normal conditions and during social events in both Iran and Germany, evaluating their performance using Mean Squared Error (MSE), Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE). Our results demonstrate that the DWT-LSTM method achieves the highest accuracy, with MAPE ranging from 0.59% to 4.2% for Iran and 0.29% to 3.02% for Germany, across hour-ahead to year-ahead forecasts. Moreover, during special events and festivals, DWT-LSTM exhibits precise forecasting capabilities, with MAPE ranging from 0.55% to 3.07% for Iran and 0.33% to 6.01% for Germany, spanning hour-ahead to week-ahead predictions. Comparative analysis of the implemented methods confirms the superior accuracy of DWT-LSTM, followed by LSTM, NARX, and SVM methods, respectively. Our proposed forecasting approach demonstrates high performance in anticipating electricity load under both standard conditions and during significant social events in diverse geographical contexts.
- ItemWhy do people visit or avoid public green spaces? Insights from an online map-based survey in Bochum, Germany(London [u.a.] : Taylor & Francis, 2025) Romelli, Claudia; Anderson, Carl C.; Fagerholm, Nora; Hansen, Rieke; Albert, ChristianPublic green spaces (PGS) have the capacity to fulfil the needs and interests of diverse groups of urban dwellers and thus contribute to their well-being. However, PGS designers and managers usually lack spatially disaggregated information on how PGS is used, by whom, and for what reasons. This study aims to assess spatial PGS visitation and avoidance patterns and their respective determinants using the city of Bochum, Germany as a case study. The research design consists of the design and application of an online map-based survey (public participation GIS–PPGIS) targeting residents and subsequent statistical and spatial analyses. Survey data include 807 completed surveys with 1084 marked visited points and 329 marked avoided points across the study area. Our results show both spatial clusters and co-occurrence of PGS visitation and avoidance. Respondents visit and avoid PGS for different reasons, which are linked to societal determinants (e.g. exercising or resting and relaxing), physical determinants (e.g. amount of grassy area or presence of trash) and sociodemographic background. Although reasons for PGS visitation and avoidance show limited spatial variation across different PGS, we find variation when disaggregating by gender and age. Insights generated can provide useful guidance for urban planners and policy makers for prioritising design and management actions to address reasons for avoidance of PGS, enhance their perceived quality and benefits, and craft PGS management concepts that better address place-specific conditions and preferences of different sociodemographic groups.
- ItemIntegrating soundscape assessments into landscape planning from the perspective of ecosystem services: concept, methodology, and application(Hannover : Institutionelles Repositorium der Leibniz Universität Hannover, 2025) Chen, ZhuLand use conditions and needs are changing in different countries and regions. Emphasizing the value of nature to human beings and socio-economic development, the analysis and assessment of ecosystem service (ES) state and values as well as their changes are of imminent significance in this context, and therefore should be the main focuses in landscape planning and environmental impact studies. Cultural ecosystem services (CES), as an essential category of the relevant ES, are becoming increasingly important in contemporary societies, while facing the problem of their continued loss and poor substitutability. This makes CES a necessarily high priority in spatial planning. Natural soundscape characteristics provided by natural sounds in the ecosystems are an indispensable segment of CES, and unarguably one determinant of landscape aesthetic values and human nature-based experience. They are meaningful for the environmental quality and human well-being, and therefore, should be considered in landscape planning and environmental impact assessments. To date, such natural soundscape characteristics are still being neglected in the planning system. Although landscape planning has long considered landscape aesthetics, the natural soundscape attributes have neither been seen as a portion of landscape aesthetic quality nor incorporated into environmental impact assessments. The disturbing noise is the solely acoustic aspect during the relevant assessment procedures. An applicable methodology is still missing for assessing natural soundscapes on the landscape or even higher scale within the context of landscape planning. Such flaws hinder capturing the offered and utilized natural soundscape values in ecosystems, and comprehensively projecting changes in the landscape aesthetic quality (incl., natural soundscape characteristics) caused by sound-related factors in landscapes. For instance, the deployment of wind turbines or traffic transformation would generate new noise that may impair the landscape aesthetic quality, especially the sound-related components, and thus decrease the capacity of recreational ecosystem services (RES) in the region. Embedding soundscape concepts and evaluations into landscape planning from the perspective of ecosystem service assessments is useful for filling the mentioned gaps. Landscape planning incorporates the evaluation of all types of ESs and projects their possible changes, offering references to environmental impact assessments, and deducing objectives and measures for maintaining and restoring the landscape quality. The ES assessment at landscape or even higher levels is normally an essential step to understanding the ecosystem potential for offering the specific ES types in landscape planning. To achieve this, the user-independent assessment approach using the general public’s preferences for certain landscape characteristics is needed and effective. The intersubjective landscape preferences refer to a core of common landscape preferences that can be deduced from basic research concerning people’s perception and appreciation of landscapes and legal regulations (‘societal will’). Such an assessment usually manifests as an under-complex model and is dependent on easily derived spatial information based on the Geographic Information System (GIS). It can effectively derive spatially explicit and comparable results of ES values and impairments under uncertainty, which can usefully inform the priorities of actions and define the domains of public participation. Thus, it is ideal that the natural soundscape assessment in landscape planning employs the user-independent methodology as an appropriate starting point. The user-independent assessment and modeling approach of natural soundscape capacity should consider the core of common soundscape preferences, which can be derived from previous studies on people’s perceptions and preferences for certain soundscape characteristics. This approach should be not only easily transferred and reproduced but also flexible to be modified, supplemented, and improved. Its results allow for spatial comparisons between different regions to inform plan-, decision-, or policy-making. The results can also be utilized to project the possible changes in the soundscape capacity caused by pressures, which influence the landscape aesthetic quality or recreational ecosystem services capacity eventually. This thesis aims to incorporate soundscape concepts and evaluations into landscape planning based on the framework of ES assessment, by providing novel insight and approach to the assessments of natural soundscape characteristics and changes at planning- and policy-relevant levels. It focuses on the CES provided by natural soundscape characteristics, which is closely related to landscape aesthetic quality and recreational experience. It can also improve the consideration of the acoustic environmental features in landscape planning and impact assessments. Thus, the main objective of this thesis is achieved following three guiding objectives: (i) to synthesize existing knowledge and evidence that are applicable for deducing people’s general preferences for certain soundscape features, (ii) to develop a methodology for spatially assessing and mapping natural soundscape quality, and (iii) to explore the impacts of sound composition changes on the natural soundscape perception and its benefits to landscape aesthetic quality. The first aim lays the foundation of evaluation criteria and indicator systems for the assessment methodology and identifies which aspects are still insufficient. The second objective contributes to developing the prototype of a modeling methodology for landscape planning, using the user-independent approach with the findings from the first work. The third aim strives to provide empirical evidence to support the model application in detecting possible changes in soundscape and landscape in environmental impact assessments. To this end, the thesis first proposed a planning-oriented soundscape evaluation framework, which conceptually integrates soundscape knowledge into landscape planning based on a practical ecosystem service evaluation model. This framework inherently has the potential to be applied within the widely used Driving Forces, Pressures, State, Impacts, and Responses (DPSIR) model. It was then used to guide a systematic review of a vast amount of literature. This review synthesized applicable knowledge and evidence in terms of people’s common preferences for specific soundscape characteristics and a series of usable indicators. The synthesized existing evidence was sufficient to identify the general public’s perception and preferences of acoustic amenities and soundscape characteristics from nature, supporting the construction of the preliminary evaluation criteria. However, the explicit knowledge concerning the impacts of landscape changes, especially bird biodiversity and planning projects with possible noise issues, on the natural soundscape benefits remained largely unclear. Subsequently, a user-independent modeling methodology for spatially explicit assessment of natural soundscape quality was developed and examined. This methodology provides a natural soundscape quality index (indicator-based model) constructed by adopting the findings of the first work and making necessary supplements. As a preliminary indicator-based model, this index currently includes the three prevalent natural sound types that are birdsong, water sound, and vegetation sound. It evaluates natural soundscape quality as a capacity provided by the ecosystem, but not necessarily the value presented at a certain moment. Accordingly, for quantifying the birdsong-related indicators, the model considers the occurrence and offered value of the birdsongs from all potential passerine bird species within the ecosystem. The evaluation criteria and results align with the public’s common soundscape perception and preferences. The developed model was then implemented in a case study area in Springe municipality, Germany, to spatially evaluate and map the natural soundscape capacity on a supralocal scale. The spatial data of habitat types was used to spatially locate the natural sound sources. The comparability and communicability were exhibited in the assessment results among different given areas. This natural soundscape quality index is easily transferable and repeatable and therefore can be applied at various planning and management scales, which allows the soundscape assessment to be implementable at the planning level. The third core part of this thesis provides empirical evidence regarding the impact of different sound compositions on the public’s evaluations of soundscape and landscape qualities, helping to supplement the aspect of soundscape impact assessment of the literature-based evaluation in the developed model. This part also investigates the differences in people’s evaluations due to demographic characteristics. The results can contribute to the completeness of soundscape assessment methodology in landscape planning, by understanding the pressure-specific sensitivity of the state values of soundscapes and landscapes of the general public and specific user groups. They are also helpful to the projection of changes in the values of natural soundscapes and landscape aesthetic quality caused by certain factors, such as different types of birdsongs and noise issues, in landscape planning and environmental impact assessment. The limited influence of demographic characteristics on the evaluations can reflect the commonality of the public’s sensitivity to sound-related elements in the environment from a different angle. Still, the several identified differences in the evaluations among different user groups can also inform the preparation of public participation and proposed measures in planning and decision-making. More studies are still necessary in the future to provide empirical evidence for the relevant topics, which will comprise the foundation for deducing the public’s common values of the sensitivity to different pressures that may influence the states of soundscape and landscape. This thesis advances the knowledge of the soundscape assessment targeted at landscape planning and environmental impact studies, which opens up an avenue particularly for planning-oriented soundscape studies, and fills the missing dimension within the realm of landscape aesthetic assessment. The core work of this thesis proposes a novel insight for understanding soundscape components in the framework of ecosystem service evaluation, develops a user-independent methodology for being able to spatially assess natural soundscape quality at the planning level, and provides empirical evidence for supplementing the knowledge of soundscape sensitivity to specific pressures to complete relevant environmental impact assessments. The study results can provide useful information and added value for policy-, plan-, and decision-making in terms of supporting the measures or responses to changes in soundscapes and landscapes, communicating soundscape values trade-offs between different planning goals and options, and facilitating public participation in soundscape issues. Overall, the work of this thesis has laid a good start and guidance for integrating soundscape assessments into landscape planning and environmental impact studies from concept to application.