Abstract
Street trees are an important part of urban facilities, and they can provide both aesthetic benefits and ecological benefits for urban environments. Ecological benefits of street trees now are attracting more attention because of environmental deterioration in cities. Conventional methods of evaluating ecological benefits require a lot of labor and time, and establishing an efficient and effective evaluating method is challenging. In this study, we investigated the feasibility to use mobile laser scanning (MLS) data to evaluate carbon sequestration and fine particulate matter (PM2.5) removal of street trees. We explored the approach to extract individual street trees from MLS data, and street trees of three streets in Nantong City were extracted. The correctness rates and completeness rates of extraction results were both over 92%. Morphological parameters, including tree height, crown width, and diameter at breast height (DBH), were measured for extracted street trees, and parameters derived from MLS data were in a good agreement with field-measured parameters. Necessary information about street trees, including tree height, DBH, and tree species, meteorological data and PM2.5 deposition velocities were imported into i-Tree Eco model to estimate carbon sequestration and PM2.5 removal. The estimation results indicated that ecological benefits generated by different tree species were considerably varied and the differences for trees of the same species were mainly caused by the differences in morphological parameters (tree height and DBH). This study succeeds in estimating the amount of carbon sequestration and PM2.5 removal of individual street trees with MLS data, and provides researchers with a novel and efficient way to investigate ecological benefits of urban street trees or urban forests.
Highlights
Rapid urbanization tends to increase urban temperature, carbon dioxide (CO2) emission, and ozone levels, which make urban areas warmer than rural areas [1]
Extraction of individual street trees was applied for three streets in the study area, respectively, and the extracting correctness rates were above 92%
This work has proven that using raw mobile laser scanning (MLS) data to obtain morphological information and evaluate ecological benefits of individual urban street trees rapidly is feasible
Summary
Rapid urbanization tends to increase urban temperature, carbon dioxide (CO2) emission, and ozone levels, which make urban areas warmer than rural areas [1]. Shading and transpiration of street trees can reduce high urban temperatures and improve the thermal comfort for humans [1,4]. Trees can capture fine particles more effectively, and improve air quality in urban areas [3,5,6,7,8,9]. Apart from the above benefits, street trees have some other instrumental functions, such as noise pollution mitigation [10], aesthetic improvement [3,6,7,8,9], urban biodiversity conservation, human health improvement [8,9], building energy reduction [4], and surface water runoff reduction [5,7]
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