Impacts of urbanization on green infrastructure ecosystem services: the case study of post-soviet Moscow

Green infrastructure (GI) and ecosystem services (ES) improve the quality of urban life and aid city’s sustainable development. During the Soviet period, GI was an important part of spatial planning. Today, many post-Soviet cities face the problem of its deterioration due to the rapid economic growth and subsequent urban sprawl. Moscow is an exceptional case of a European city that both inherits features of central planning and integrates modern methods of greening. This paper aims to define the role of urban expansion in GI and ES transformation in Moscow during the last 25 years. Our method is based on combining spatial data on land-use from Open Street Map and Atlas of Urban Expansion, and reclassified Landsat images. The research revealed that the most important for ES provision land categories have gradually shrunk, especially in old Moscow, where the share of built-up area has increased by 18%. Considering the results, we stress that recent GI development mostly concerns small GI elements that do not provide regulating or supporting ES, while large GI massifs continue to deteriorate, thus resulting in a misbalance of urban ES provision.