ABSTRACT

This chapter describes the surface area covered by parking lots in the Upper Great Lakes region. It utilizes this information to estimate two general environmental consequences of these parking lots: degradation of water quality and loss of ecosystem services due to the conversion from natural land to impervious surfaces. Urbanization tends to occur gradually, and it is easy to overlook both the amount of land devoted to parking lots and their cumulative environmental impacts. R. Costanza and colleagues estimated the extent to which a variety of ecosystem services would be lost if natural areas were converted for human use, such as urban or agricultural land cover. They used several ecological economics approaches to estimate the value of natural areas, such as wetlands, and numerous ecologists have used these techniques to estimate the cost of the loss of other ecosystem services.