Tropical cities can use urban greening designs featuring trees that provide shade and cooling in hot outdoor environments. The cooling effect involves numerous tree characteristics that are not easy to control during planting design, such as the canopy size and the optical properties of leaves. Planting the appropriate tree species dominates the cooling effects and the human thermal environment. Based on environmental and plant data, including the tree species, crown diameter of trees, physiologically equivalent temperature (PET), and sky view factor (SVF) in an outdoor space, a series of hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) procedures was implemented to identify the tree species that are appropriate for improving thermal comfort. The results indicated strong correlations between SVF, average crown diameter, and PET. SVF decreased as the average crown diameter increased. For the average crown diameter of trees in an area wider than 1.5 m, the cooling effect was especially dominated by the tree species. Therefore, 15 species were screened by HCA procedures, based on a similar cooling effect. These species had various cooling effects, and were divided into four categories. Tree species, such as Spathodea campanulata and Cinnamomum camphora, had the appropriate crown diameter and cooling effect for the most comfortable thermal environment. Full article

Due to 4000 m elevation variation with temperature differences equivalent to 50 degrees of latitudinal gradient, exploring Taiwan’s spatial vegetation trends is valuable in terms of diverse ecosystems and climatic types covering a relatively small island with an area of 36,000 km². This study analyzed Taiwan’s spatial vegetation trends with controlling environmental variables through redundancy (RDA) and hierarchical cluster (HCA) analyses over three decades (1982–2012) of monthly normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) derived from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) NDVI3g data for 19 selected weather stations over the island. Results showed two spatially distinct vegetation response groups. Group 1 comprises weather stations which remained relatively natural showing a slight increasing NDVI tendency accompanied with rising temperature, whereas Group 2 comprises stations with high level of human development showing a slight decreasing NDVI tendency associated with increasing temperature-induced moisture stress. Statistically significant controlling variables include climatic factors (temperature and precipitation), orographic factors (mean slope and aspects), and anthropogenic factor (population density). Given the potential trajectories for future warming, variable precipitation, and population pressure, challenges, such as land-cover and water-induced vegetation stress, need to be considered simultaneously for establishing adequate adaptation strategies to combat climate change challenges in Taiwan. Full article