As an important part of urban ecosystems, trees can effectively alleviate the urban heat island effect. Tree canopies cool and humidify through shading and evapotranspiration, regulating the urban thermal environment. So far, many studies have analyz...
Urban tree canopy (UTC) is commonly used to assess urban forest extent and has traditionally been estimated using photointerpretation and human intelligence (HI). Artificial intelligence (AI) models may provide a less labor-intensive method to estima...
24 February 2023
Rapid urbanization has led to a series of environmental problems that are harmful to the physical and mental health of residents. Not only can increasing urban tree canopy (UTC) improve sustainable city development, but it can also effectively promot...
Urban forest is a dynamic urban ecosystem that provides critical benefits to urban residents and the environment. Accurate mapping of urban forest plays an important role in greenspace management. In this study, we apply a deep learning model, the U-...
In this cross-sectional, ecological study of Los Angeles County ZIP codes, we evaluated the association between tree canopy coverage and asthma prevalence. Urban tree canopy has been promoted as a way to improve air quality and mitigate urban heat, b...
As the world’s urban population increases to the predicted 70% of the total population, urban infrastructure and built-up land will continue to grow as well. This growth will continue to have an impact on the urban heat island effect in all of...
Urban tree canopy (UTC) coverage, or area, is an important metric for monitoring changes in UTC over large areas within a municipality. Several methods have been used to obtain these data, but remote sensing image classification is one of the fastest...
Urban heat and hardscapes increase cooling electricity demand, stressing power grids and disproportionately burdening deprived neighborhoods. While previous studies have documented the cooling benefits of urban tree canopy, most analyses remain at co...
The benefits of tree canopy in urban and suburban landscapes are increasingly well known: stormwater runoff control, air-pollution mitigation, temperature regulation, carbon storage, wildlife habitat, neighborhood cohesion, and other social indicator...
The National Land Cover Database (NLCD) provides time-series data characterizing the land surface for the United States, including land cover and tree canopy cover (NLCD-TC). NLCD-TC was first published for 2001, followed by versions for 2011 (releas...
Urban tree canopy (UTC) provides urban residents with numerous benefits, including positive mental and physical health, the mitigation and prevention of urban heat islands, and a sense of place. Numerous studies have shown that as the wealth of a com...
This study aimed to determine whether canopy and air temperature difference (ΔT) as an existing simple normalizing index can be used to detect an increase in canopy temperature induced by soil drought in urban parks, regardless of the unique en...
Urban tree canopy (UTC) area is an important index for evaluating the urban ecological environment; the very high resolution (VHR) images are essential for improving urban tree canopy survey efficiency. However, the traditional image classification m...
This study presents a methodology for developing a high-resolution (2 m) urban tree canopy leaf area inventory in different tree phenological seasons and a subsequent application of the methodology to a 625 km2 urban area in Tokyo. Satellite remote s...
Urbanization transforms simple two-dimensional natural spaces into complex three-dimensional (3D) artificial spaces through intense land use. Hence, urbanization continuously transforms vertical urban settings and the corresponding sky view area. As...
Accurately estimating aboveground carbon storage (AGC) of urban vegetation remains a major challenge, due to the heterogeneity and vertical complexity of urban environments, where traditional forest-based remote sensing models often perform poorly. T...
As more land area than ever is covered with impermeable surfaces causing problems in the environment, urban trees are effective not only in mitigating environmental problems in the built environment and reducing buildings’ energy use, but also...
Research Highlights: Historic trend analysis of urban tree canopy cover change, while growing in popularity, remains uncommon and concentrated to just a handful of countries. Background and Objectives: Tree canopy cover is a relatively quick, easy to...
Understanding the thermal effects of different urban patterns that constitute today’s urban landscapes is critical to the development of urban resilience to climate change. This article aims to assess the efficiency of urban green spaces in the...
This study mapped and analyzed urban tree canopy change between 2014 and 2019 within the Urban Development Boundary of Miami-Dade County, Florida. The goal was to identify local areas of tree canopy gain or loss over this 5-year period. The compariso...
The benefits of the urban tree and tree canopy (UTC) are increasingly crucial in addressing urban sustainability. Yet, increasingly evident from earlier research is the distributional inequities of UTC and active efforts to expand tree plantings. Les...
The study of density and growth of pine, birch and oak seedlings and saplings in canopy gaps in the urban boreal forest in Riga, Latvia, indicates that natural regeneration can increase diversity in small gaps caused by tree mortality, and can ensure...
Urban forests are an important part of any city, given that they provide several environmental benefits, such as improving urban drainage, climate regulation, public health, biodiversity, and others. However, tree detection in cities is challenging,...
Estimation of urban tree canopy parameters plays a crucial role in urban forest management. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) have been widely used for many applications particularly forestry mapping. UAV-derived images, captured by an onboard camera, p...
Accurate knowledge of urban forest patterns contributes to well-managed urbanization, but accurate urban tree canopy mapping is still a challenging task because of the complexity of the urban structure. In this paper, a new method that combines doubl...
Trees in urban settings are becoming increasingly important as mediators to emerging challenges that transect social, environmental, and economic factors. Trees provide shade; absorb and store atmospheric carbon and other pollutants; reduce local tem...
(1) Background: Urban tree species mapping is crucial for ecosystem service evaluation and sustainable urban strategy development. However, due to the spectral similarity among dominant urban tree species, spectral data alone are insufficient for hig...
Tree canopies in urban areas have many important ecosystem functions, and councils have targets to increase urban tree canopy area, which has proved challenging. Urban centres have large areas of impervious surfaces, and there is a perception that im...
Street trees are essential to urban ecological benefits and human well-being. The canopy morphology relates to the green view index (GVI), which needs to be calculated based on specific tree species. This study conducts a field study on 760 street tr...
Cities are significantly warmer than their surrounding rural environments. Known as the ‘urban heat island effect’, it can affect the health of urban residents and lead to increased energy use, public health impacts, and damage to infrast...
As urbanization draws more people to metropolitan areas, a steadfast increase in impervious surfaces ultimately contributes to a pronounced urban heat island effect. While city greening strategies to mitigate urban thermal effects often tout street-t...
An expansive body of research demonstrates the social and ecological benefits of urban forests, although urban tree canopy density tends to be lower than average in areas occupied by marginalized populations. Non-profit organizations and local govern...
Urban tree canopies are a vital component of green infrastructure, especially in the context of the accelerating urban heat island effect and global climate change. Quantifying urban canopy cover in relation to land use and land cover changes is ther...
The research proposes an application of a modification of the 3–30–300 rule to identify areas that require Urban Forestry implementation in small and medium-sized Roman and/or medieval urban areas. The selected case study is that of Asti...
As the intensity of the urban heat island effect increases, the cooling effect of urban trees has become important. Urban trees cool surfaces during the day via shading, increasing albedo and transpiration. Many studies are being conducted to calcula...
This paper is devoted to the assessment of urban greening effects on two important ecosystem services, i.e., air quality and CO2 storage, including the corresponding economic impacts in a real urban area, i.e., a district located in the Mediterranean...
This study explores environmental inequality through a novel quantitative approach, analyzing urban vegetation in two contrasting neighborhoods in Cleveland, Ohio—East Cleveland and Shaker Heights. Utilizing computer vision and Google Street Vi...
Urban forests have a definition that has developed over time. Initially defined as urban greenery or as a measure of human impacts from urbanisation on forest systems, urban forests have varying definitions and are more often referred to for urban gr...
There is growing evidence that exposure to nature increases human well-being, including in urban areas. However, relatively few studies have linked subjective satisfaction to objective features of the environment. In this study we explore the links a...
As the climate continues to warm, and municipal leaders look for cost-effective and timely approaches to urban sustainability, one increasingly sought-out approach is the use of tree canopy to cool neighborhoods. Despite widespread efforts to expand...
Thermal regime warming and increased variability can result in human developed watersheds due to runoff over impervious surfaces and influence of stormwater pipes. This study quantified relationships between tree canopy, impervious surface, and water...
(1) Background: With rapid urbanization, birds are facing a variety of challenges. Evaluating bird behaviour changes in response to urbanization can help us understand how to make them coexist sustainably with humans. We aimed to investigate whether...
Accurate and efficient delineation of individual tree crowns is crucial for urban forest inventories and ecosystem service assessments but is often limited by the manual selection of parameters for segmentation algorithms. This study investigates the...
Urban forest ecosystems provide a range of social and ecological services, but due to the heterogeneity of these canopies their spatial extent is difficult to quantify and monitor. Traditional per-pixel classification methods have been used to map ur...
A simple statistical model capturing the degree to which different patterns of urban development intensify urban heat islands (UHIs) and stress human health would be useful but has remained elusive. Accurately predicting street-level urban air temper...
The world’s big cities, including Budapest, are becoming more crowded, with more and more people living in smaller and smaller spaces. There is an increasing demand for more green space and trees, with less vertical and less horizontal space. I...
Transpiration and canopy shading are the main ways that trees cool urban environments; this is crucial to human survival and improving urban livability in the context of global warming and rapid urbanization. So far, most studies focus on the combine...
The living vegetation volume (LVV) can accurately describe the spatial structure of greening trees and quantitatively represent the relationship between this greening and its environment. Because of the mostly line shape distribution and the complex...
Ecosystem services (ESs) are extremely important, specifically in urban areas. Urban forests, even representing a pivotal role in global sustainability, have been converted into different human-modified landscapes. This paper aims to analyze the ES p...
Greenery is one of the most influential factors in reducing the outdoor air temperature and enhancing the microclimate in hot areas. Previous studies focused on studying Urban Heat Islands (UHI) on a specific level; this research investigates the imp...
of 7