Ecological assessment of green spaces: a systematic review of parameters and a proposed seven-category classification...

Green spaces are ecologically significant landscapes that provide critical ecosystem services across diverse environmental and spatial contexts. Despite an expanding body of research, the parameters employed for ecological assessment of green spaces remain fragmented across disciplines with no unified framework for their classification. This study addresses this gap through a systematic literature review of studies indexed in Web of Science and Scopus databases, encompassing 113 publications in the fields of ecology and environmental science. The review systematically examines assessment contexts, spatial typologies, research domains, and ecological assessment parameters. Two primary assessment contexts are identified: urban green spaces and non-urban green spaces, representing fundamentally different spatial scales, management regimes, and ecological characteristics. Seven research themes are identified: spatio-temporal dynamics, ecosystem services, health and well-being, landscape characteristics, thermal environment, mapping and indexing, and ecological assessment. Parameters employed in different assessments are identified and those parameters which are applied in ecological assessment are organized into seven distinct categories: vegetation condition, landscape integrity, hydrological regulation, anthropogenic pressure, terrain-based factors, thermal and surface stress, and LULC dynamics. This seven-category framework provides a structured and replicable basis for assessing the ecological quality of green spaces across spatial scales and environmental settings, supporting conservation prioritization and evidence-based resource allocation.