sustainability Article The Utilization of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index to Map Habitat Quality in Turin (Italy) Stefano Salata 1,* , Carolina Giaimo 2, Carlo Alberto Barbieri 2, Andrea Ballocca 3, Francesco Scalise 3 and Giulio Pantaloni 2 1 Interuniversity Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning, Responsible Risk Resilience Centre, Politecnico di Torino, 10125 Torino, Italy 2 Interuniversity Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning, Politecnico di Torino, 10125 Torino, Italy;
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[email protected]; Tel.: +39-011-090-7475 Received: 26 August 2020; Accepted: 17 September 2020; Published: 19 September 2020 Abstract: The integration of ecosystem service mapping in decision-making is crucial to place effective urban design and sustainable planning solutions. Nonetheless, often ecosystem service maps are the product of different data inputs that influences the final modeling output thus affecting final decisions, especially when a finer and site-specific assessment is required to design practical and effective solutions. In this work, the city of Turin (Northwest Italy) was selected as a test site for an empirical experiment of ecosystem service mapping using the software Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST): two habitat quality models of the city were compared in a Geographic Information System environment, the first using the “traditional” sensitivity employed during the LIFE SAM4CP European research while the second using the natural difference vegetation index to re-assign the sensitivity scores.