Linking ecosystem service valuation with mobility data to reveal who benefits from urban parks

Urban parks provide critical ecosystem services (ES), including carbon sequestration, air filtration, and stormwater regulation, yet a central question remains unresolved: who benefits from these services? Approaches to answer this question may rely on costly, small-scale surveys, limiting their scope and use across multiple parks. Here, we integrate ecological field data with mobile phone point-of-interest (POI) data from 12 urban parks to quantify both the magnitude of ES and the spatial distribution of ES benefits to park users in Los Angeles, California. Using i-Tree Eco and i-Tree Canopy, we estimate ecological and economic values of tree-based ES and leverage anonymized mobility data to capture park use patterns and user home origins. We found that canopy coverage and vegetation structure strongly correspond with ES benefit distribution, more so than park size or park age. Additionally, whereas all parks served users from the immediate neighborhood, the features of some parks may provide benefits that extend farther to the citywide scale. This study contributes to a growing literature that emphasizes integrated socio-ecological approaches to ES assessments that reveal both the magnitude of benefits generated and who receives those benefits across an urban landscape.