Evaluation of spatial integrity of urban greenspaces on a case of the Silesian Metropolis (southern Poland)

Contemporary urban landscapes feature a variety of urban ecosystems, synonymous with urban greenspaces. Maintaining a high-quality greenspace system is essential for promoting the sustainable development of cities. Urban greenspaces provide a full spectrum of ecosystem services, ensuring the well-being of city-dwellers. However, urban greenspaces in many European cities have a highly fragmented, mosaic structure, and the aspect of their spatial configuration tends to be overlooked in the scientific research.

The research aimed to evaluate the spatial integrity of urban greenspaces, defined as the configuration of the greenspaces’ spatial structure that ensures their interconnection.

To achieve the research goal, spatial analyses were conducted using GIS software. To extract the urban greenspaces, the Urban Atlas served as the data source. The Silesian Metropolis was chosen as the research area due to its diversity of urban greenspaces and its large spatial extent at the landscape scale. The evaluation of spatial integrity was based on well-established assumptions in the field of landscape ecology research. The urban greenspaces were evaluated through scoring, in terms of five variables: greenspace patch area, core area of the patch, neighborhood between nearest patches, proximity index, and suitability of land cover for ecological functions. Supplementally, Moran’s I spatial autocorrelation statistics was calculated, to better interpret the overall configuration pattern.

The results indicate significant variability in the spatial integrity of urban greenspaces, particularly when comparing different types of greenspaces. It was found that despite a high fragmentation of urban greenspaces, a relatively large part is strongly integrated with the others. On the other hand, the greenspace patches near urban centers have a low level of spatial integrity.

The study enabled the classification of urban greenspaces in terms of their spatial integrity on a five-level scale. The author aims to highlight the applicability of results in managing urban ecosystems. The elaborated method can also be utilized in other research areas, enabling comparative studies.