Urban areas do provide ecosystem services

Locatelli et al. (2017) characterized how land-use trajectories affect ecosystem services (ES) in mountain landscapes. Despite acknowledging that “urban ecosystems may provide important provisioning services and a variety of cultural services” (Locatelli et al. 2017), their model described urban areas as “Worst-case scenarios (decrease of all services),” with a near-complete absence of provisioning, regulating, and cultural services relative to services in more natural (less developed) areas. We comment on this.