CREAF

The conservation and planning of green infrastructure is bound to play a key role to ensure the conservation of biodiversity and the provision of ecosystem services in such densely populated metropolitan regions. As a result, a careful deployment of this green infrastructure must be included in planning figures and guidelines currently in force or under development, such as the Urban Master Plan (PDU) of the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona (MAB). This deployment should be based on sufficiently consistent information, both in terms of the suitability of the proposed indicators and the resolution and updating of the available cartographic information.

In the case of the MAB, several recent works have assessed the state of conservation of biodiversity, the pressures on biodiversity and the provision of ecosystem services of the green infrastructure. However, these diagnoses are mostly based on relatively outdated information, such as that available in SITxell for the whole province (www.sitxell.eu/ca/mapes.asp). On the other hand, its cartographic representation takes as reference the latest edition (2009) of the Land Cover Map of Catalonia (MCSC). It is therefore urgent a revision and updating of this information to be used in the framework of the PDU. In this regard, it is worth remembering that CREAF recently developed a new version of the MCSC for the MAB and its adjacent area, from ICGC images of 2015. This map provides the most recent and accurate cartographic base to display the green infrastructure of the MAB.

With this background, the two main objectives of this project are:

1. Update and review on the new MCSC the cartographic information of diverse indicators of biodiversity conservation and of ecosystem service provision: Habitat conservation concern; Carbon and biomass stocks; Regulation of pollutants; Water regulation; Procurement of food.
2. Specifically, update and refine the Terrestrial Connectivity Index (ICT), initially developed for the whole of Catalonia, for the MAB and adjacent areas.