Monitoring the climatic effects of street tree plantation in different urban patterns by synthetic image based BPNN simulations

Abstract

One of the most effective, economical, environmentally friendly, and easily applied methods used to combat the overheating of urban areas is properly arranging the urban landscape. In particular, road networks play an important role in the heating of urban areas and occupy the most area among the different types of public spaces. Hence, it is evident that street landscape design methods represent a significant resource for enhancing urban climate change resilience. In this study, the effect of plantation of streets with trees on the local climate was investigated for Istanbul and Antalya in Turkey. In the comparison of these two cities, four pattern types (discrete low-rise, discrete mid-rise, discrete high-rise, compact low/mid-rise) that are common in both were used. The simulations were performed by BPNN method that used the synthetic images obtained by manipulating the original satellite images. By this way, as a result of the simulations, the synthetic surface temperature images of planted streets were obtained. The climatic changes were examined by applying thermal change detection analysis and cooling distance analysis for the streets that were planted with trees. According to these results, street tree plantation leads to a cooling effect that extends up to 50 m in Istanbul and up to 300 m in Antalya varying according to the urban pattern type. When the results were compared between the discrete pattern types, it was found that the cooling effect due to street tree planting in the low-rise was effective up to longer distances than the high-rise pattern types.