Abstract
Urban forest plays a crucial role in coping with global change and rapid urbanization, such as improving air quality, fixing carbon, mitigating environmental degradation, and providing other ecosystem services. In this context, cities in Guangdong-Hongkong-Macao Greater Bay Area of China (GBA) established increasing investment in urban forest construction since 2000. However, data on the current condition of the planted forests remains scarce, which hampers a comprehensive understanding of how to improve the quality of urban forest planning and construction in the future. Therefore, we selected a core city Guangzhou, an inland city Foshan and a coastal city Zhuhai in GBA as our research objects and launched a field measurement for the forest structure. Besides, ecological and landscape indexes were introduced to evaluate the potential, diversity, and stability of the forests in the core urban area (CUA), semi urban area (SUA), and urban fringe area (UFA) of the three cities. The results show that Guangzhou has a well-planned forest pattern with advantages in forest structures and visible landscape values in different areas. To introduce different tree species in CUA and SUA and to plant more trees of those rare tree species in UFA can effectively increase Guangzhou’s forest diversity and evenness. For Foshan, it is advisable to implement a balanced forest-investment policy by making specific recommendations for different areas, such as planting various tree species in CUA and UFA to increase forest diversity. Zhuhai is distinguished for the attractiveness for tourists by the advantages in landscape diversity and stability, but it is still necessary to plant different trees with appropriate classes to enhance the urban forest stability. Overall, it is crucial for city managers to obtain precise knowledge of urban forest conditions from both the ecological and landscape perspectives, which may contribute enormously to the improvement of the quality of urban forest planning and construction in adapting to various environmental challenges.
Highlights
Humanity nowadays is experiencing a dramatic shift to urban living and the percentage of urban dwellers is estimated to exceed 60% by the year 2030 (Grimm et al, 2008; Seto et al, 2011)
Plot Investigations and Tree Dimensional Variables. Those plots containing urban forests were investigated for tree species composition and tree numbers firstly, and the relative density bar graph for core urban area (CUA), semi urban area (SUA), and urban fringe area (UFA) in the three cities was displayed as Figure 2
For the density of tree species, little difference was found between the three areas for both Guangzhou and Zhuhai, while UFA in Foshan had higher density (32.2/ha) than its CUA (16.7/ha) and SUA (15.6/ha)
Summary
Humanity nowadays is experiencing a dramatic shift to urban living and the percentage of urban dwellers is estimated to exceed 60% by the year 2030 (Grimm et al, 2008; Seto et al, 2011). Accompanying the rapid urbanization, global change including elevated CO2, increased temperature, and land-use change is projected to have increasingly detrimental impacts on cities (Alberti, 2005; IPCCCC, 2007; Parnell et al, 2007). In this context, urban forests were considered to play a crucial role in coping with various environmental challenges, such as improving air quality, fixing carbon, mitigating environmental degradation, and providing other ecosystem services (Alonzo et al, 2016; Steenberg et al, 2017), which had been widely researched (Dobbs et al, 2011; Escobedo et al, 2011). How urban communities benefited from the various ecosystem services provided by urban forests and trees were widely studied in both temporal and spatial scales all over the world (Young, 2010; Dobbs et al, 2014; Livesley et al, 2016)
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