Quantifying and Mapping the Realized Value of Ecosystem Services in Megacities

Abstract Spatial mechanisms significantly influence the delivery of ecosystem services (ES) from the provision to the benefiting parties, and their specific impacts on the realized value of ecosystem services (RVES) are yet to be clarified. In this paper, by introducing distance-decay and landscape configuration variables into a real estate hedonic price model and taking Beijing as an example, we systematically examine the effects of various spatial mechanisms on RVES in an urban setting. Results show that the contribution of ES to real property values is 20.4%, two thirds of which is contributed by spatial factors at various scales. Moreover, the RVES yielded in this paper is about two orders of magnitude higher than that assessed using the conventional “per unit-area ES value” approach, which hints at a very different picture of ES value distribution when the realization, rather than the sole provision of ES values is concerned.