Abstract
Urban forestry has significant importance in human life and has provided multiple ecosystem services for city dwellers such as food production, water storage, raw materials, habitat provision, temperature regulation, recreation, tourism, and educational importance. Besides that urban forestry also has some disservices such as allergic potential, damage to infrastructure, aesthetic damage, and failure of tree growth. Despite growing scholarly attention to urban forests, few studies to date have conducted comprehensive assessments of their ecosystem services and disservices. This study conducts an interdisciplinary and wide-ranging assessment of ecosystem services and disservices of Lalitpur Metropolitan City (LMC). 7 ecosystem services and 4 disservices were identified from the literature review. Taking into consideration these ecosystem services and disservices from literature review a questionnaire survey was conducted among the local inhabitants of Lalitpur Metropolitan City. Most of the respondents perceive the defined ecosystem services and disservices in LMC whereas most of the respondents perceive aesthetic damage in small concentrations as urban ecosystem disservice. A correlation test among ecosystem services and disservices was done by using Spearman’s correlation analysis. Water storage has a strong correlation with all the ecosystem services perceived except food production. Besides that, habitat provision also has a strong correlation with temperature regulation and education opportunities. Along with that damage to infrastructure and aesthetic damage have a strong correlation, allergic potential and aesthetic damage have a moderate correlation while all the disservices have a weak correlation. One-way ANOVA was performed to test the statistical significance between demographic factors, multiple ecosystem services, and disservices of urban forest with the significance value (i.e., p<0.05). Education level has no significant difference in perceived ecosystem services and disservices. Cronbach’s Alpha was used to test the reliability of the eight items of protection of the urban forest in LMC. I would pay more municipal tax to protect urban forests, which was insignificant so was removed from the analysis. The KMO test and Bartlett test were done to assess the validity of the null hypothesis. Mean, standard deviation, and variance for all the items were calculated and overall, all the respondents agreed with the items of urban forest protection. One-way ANOVA was performed to test the statistical significance between demographic factors and items of protection of urban forest with the significance value (i.e., p<0.05).
