The Urban Atlas Project is a collaboration between twelve cities around the world: Bangalore, Canberra, Cape Town, Chicago, Helsinki, Istanbul, New Delhi, New Orleans, New York City, Phoenix, Shanghai and Stockholm. The aim is to develop new tools for understanding the social-ecological capacities to provide access to and sustain ecosystem services. The Project is led by the Urban Research theme at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. Together with the other site-based nodes we address a common set of research questions, such as What are the effects of urban development and land use change on biodiversity and ecosystem service delivery?; and How are different socio economic groups affected by environmental changes in urban regions?

The “Urban Atlas Portal” maps the spatial extent of selected ecosystem services and biodiversity and to what extent different socio-economic groups have access to these services. The Atlas visualizes data on land use /land cover, elevation, NDVI, green areas, biodiversity, ecological values, ecosystem services, and satellite images/aerial photos at different scales. The Atlas also includes temporal changes and provides guidelines for where in the urban landscape specific management interventions, protection, restoration or creation would be most needed from a public interest point of view.

Support received from
- Stockholm Resilience Centre,
- Formas, and
- Sida.

The Portal is developed in partnership with GSLab and Electric Gaunitz.