Vegetation as an essential positive sustainable element of urban spaces has recently gathered increased attention from landscape architects and urban planners. Vegetation growing in urban settings can bring environmental benefits that enhance the health and well-being of citizens through, for example, improved air quality, increased thermal insulation for buildings, reduction of the urban heat-...

Santiago, Chile has the distinction of having among the worst urban air pollution problems in Latin America. As part of an atmospheric pollution reduction plan, the Santiago Regional Metropolitan government defined an environmental policy goal of using urban forests to remove particulate matter less than 10 microm (PM(10)) in the Gran Santiago area. We used cost effectiveness, or the process of...

Quantification of biophysical parameters of urban trees is important for urban planning, and for assessing carbon sequestration and ecosystem services. Airborne lidar has been used extensively in recent years to estimate biophysical parameters of trees in forested ecosystems. However, similar studies are largely lacking for individual trees in urban landscapes. Prediction models to estimate bio...

300 words): Recently, mobile laser scanning (MLS) has emerged as an efficient means to acquire massive 3D point clouds along urban road corridors for the several applications such as building footprint reconstruction, facade modeling and road traffic inventories. In this paper, we propose an automated strategy to address the issue of detecting 3D individual trees in urban traffic corridors usin...

Urban trees have gained in importance during recent decades, but little is known about the temporal dynamic of tree growth in urban areas. The present study investigated the allometric relationships of stem diameter, tree height, and crown radius for six different tree species in six metropolises worldwide. Increment cores of the trees were used for identifying the relationship of basal area an...

An efficient method to extract urban road based on the side trees from a high resolution remote sensing image is proposed. First, the high resolution remote sensing image was preprocessed so as to improve the extraction accuracy and reduce the difficulty of later treatment. Second, according to the reflective property of side trees and urban road, it is necessary to detect the side trees region...

Urban areas are major contributors to air pollution and climate change, causing impacts on human health that are amplified by the microclimatological effects of buildings and grey infrastructure through the urban heat island (UHI) effect. Urban greenspaces may be important in reducing surface temperature extremes, but their effects have not been investigated at a city-wide scale. Across a mid-s...

Urban trees provide substantial public health and public environmental benefits. However, scholarly works suggest that urban trees may be unequally distributed among poor and minority urban communities, meaning that these communities are potentially being deprived of public environmental benefits, a form of environmental injustice. The evidence of this problem is not uniform however, and eviden...