摘要：Regional and global scale ecosystem service assessments have demonstrated the socioeconomic value of protectingbiodiversity and have been integrated into associated policy. Local government decision makers are still unsure of theapplicability, return on investment, and usefulness of these assessments in aiding their decision making. Cape Town, a developingcity in a globally recognized biodiversity hotspot, has numerous competing land uses. City managers, with a tightly constrainedbudget, requested an exploratory study on the links between ecosystem services and biodiversity conservation within thismunicipal area. We set out to develop and test a simple and rapid ecosystem service assessment method aimed at determiningthe contribution natural vegetation remnants make to ecosystem service provision. We took selected services, identified inconjunction with city managers, and assessed these in two ways. First we used an area weighted approach to attribute servicesto vegetation types and assessed how these had changed through time and into the future given development needs. Second, wedid a regulatory and cultural service remnant distance analysis to better understand proximity effects and linkages. Provisioningservices were found to have been most severely affected through vegetation transformation. Regulatory services have beensimilarly affected, and these losses are more significant because regulatory services can only function in situ and cannot beoutsourced in the way provisioning services can. The most significant losses were in coastal zone protection and flood mitigationservices, both of which will be placed under even greater pressure given the predicted changes in climatic regimes. The role ofremnant vegetation in regulating and cultural services was shown to be a significant additional consideration in making the casefor conservation in the city. Our rapid assessment approach does not allow for nuanced and individual understanding of thetrade-offs presented by individual remnant patches, but is particularly strong in quickly identifying issues, key focus areas, andopportunities provided by this research direction, and thereby serving to facilitate and drive constructive engagement betweenecosystem service experts and city planners
