Modelled rasters of five regulating ecosystem services supply and demand (from urban green spaces) across nine Russian cities

We introduce a new general framework for comparing ecosystem service supply and demand of the key urban regulating ecosystem services (URES) provided by urban green spaces (UGS) at a city scale. We estimated supply and demand of five major URES for nine Russian cities across the latitudinal gradient (from Subarctic to dry steppe) expressed in biophysical units based on geospatial modelling and mapping. For identification of the mismatches between supply and demand, we introduce normalized difference ecosystem service supply-demand index (NDESSDI) adapted from indices widely used in remote sensing community. NDESSDI has several important requirements: 1) supply and demand must be expressed in a similar biophysical unit, where demand is identified as exceeding a threshold of a national or international environmental quality standard (EQS); 2) supply and demand spatial layers must be of similar spatial resolution; 3) while modelling UGS URES supply requires scientifically sound models or data handling, the demand requires a well-established threshold adapted to either global (e.g. World Health Organization) or national EQS. Further, we’ve spatially analyzed three parameters (demand, supply, NDESSDI) at 10-30 m spatial resolution across the target cities with respect to living population.