Urban areas worldwide face significant pressure from population growth and urban expansion, resulting in habitat loss. Urban planners need to develop a comprehensive strategy for protecting, restoring and enhancing natural heritage (such as natural features and assets), at the municipal and regional levels. Here, we propose an approach to design a Natural Heritage System (NHS) that interconnects natural features and areas. This resulting NHS aims to guide and prioritize the protection, restoration, and enhancement of ecological areas and their functions. The NHS integrates terrestrial and aquatic ecosystem functions for conservation planning. We leverage the Marxan optimization tool to identify target areas using 36 ecological features. We compare three spatial scenarios: regional-scale, watershed-scale, and a hybrid approach. We found that the hybrid scenario proved to be the most effective, covering 52% of the jurisdiction. Then, we classified the target areas into three tiers of the NHS: (1) existing natural cover (23.4%), (2) potential natural cover (12.3%), and (3) contributing areas (16.3%). Contributing areas represent additional parts of the NHS within developed or partly developed landscapes to support overall NHS health and ecological function. These tiers allow for tailored management actions: protection of existing natural cover and restoration of potential natural cover. Altogether, the areas identified for the NHS by Marxan provide a strong, science-based framework to address urbanization impacts and support long-term implementation of biodiversity and urban sustainability solutions. It also provides enhancement opportunities through green infrastructure in contributing areas using nature-based solutions aiming to conserve biodiversity in urban areas.
Chin et al. (Fri,) studied this question.