Citizen science data to measure human use of green areas and forests in European cities

Detecting and quantifying the use of green spaces and forests is paramount for sustainable urban planning. The increasing availability of large databases from existing citizen science tools can contribute to developing novel approaches to investigate urban green infrastructure. Using the iNaturalist database – a citizen science initiative on collecting the occurrences of plant and animal species worldwide – we estimated the intentional use of these urban spaces by people for their value and to understand the main drivers. We retrieved the total number of observations obtained across 672 European cities and focused on reporting from mapped green areas and forests. We used two separate multivariate explanatory models to investigate which factors explained variations in the number of observations for green areas and forests. We found a relatively heterogeneous use of these two types of urban green spaces. Gross domestic product (GDP) was important in explaining the number of visits. Availability and accessibility also had positive relationships with green areas and forests in cities, respectively. This study paves the way for better integration of citizen science data in assessing cultural landscape services provided by urban green infrastructure and, therefore, supporting the evaluation of spatial planning policies for the sustainable development of urban areas