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The urban–rural fringe is a dynamic environment where urban expansion limits the provision of landscape services. Economic valuation of these services is proposed to quantify the impact of urbanisation and inform planners of the potential losses that attribute to these land-use changes. However, most evaluation methods remain controversial regarding shortcomings in providing reliable results. This study applies market price, contingent valuation and value transfer methods and compares their performance in assessing the economic impact of land-use changes on the urban–rural fringe of the Amstelland (the Netherlands). Results with these applied methods differ greatly due to their respective advantages in revealing use values or non-use values of landscape services and dependence on land-use change. Thus, results are sensitive to value types, the scarcity of landscape services, scale of the study area, and involved stakeholders. This paper reflects on the strengths and weaknesses of these methods in different planning contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cycling benefits human health and helps to mitigate environmental issues. However, limited evidence exists regarding how the built environment influences cycling volume under different time and weather conditions. In this paper, we employed a Gradient Boosting Decision tree method to analyze the non-linear and threshold effects of the multiscale built environment and microclimate on cycling volume. Results based on the multisource data of The Netherlands show that 27 out of the 28 variables have a non-linear and threshold effect on cycling volume. Temperature is found to be a dominant factor among all variables. At street level, slope is the most important factor, followed by the green view and sky view indexes. At neighborhood level, population density is the most important factor, followed by residential density, and the density of bus stops. These findings offer useful insights for planning a cycling-friendly urban built environment at different scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural services of the landscape contribute to a higher quality of life. The provision of these services differs along the urban–rural gradient, as does their appreciation by local residents. This paper investigates residents’ preferences for cultural services along the urban–rural gradient through a map-based survey in and around the Dutch city of Maastricht. We focus on the importance of location in explaining these preferences, distinguishing the location of residents (relative to the preferred landscape units) and the location of landscape units (relative to their positions on the urban–rural gradient). The study shows that residents prefer nearby locations for all distinguished cultural services. Locations’ valuation along the urban–rural gradient, however, differs by service type: for cultural heritage locations near the city centre are preferred, while outdoor recreation and sports and passive enjoyment of green landscapes are enjoyed more in rural areas. When considering the spatial distribution of the land-use types that provide these services, we further find that people prefer green areas closer to the city for outdoor recreation and sports and passive enjoyment of green landscapes. The results illustrate the heterogeneity of people’s preferences for cultural services along the urban–rural gradient beyond the distance from their residences. We recommend policy makers to take the urban–rural gradient into account when valuating landscape units, and in particularly the importance of green landscape units close to the city for different cultural services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]