Power-law distributions of urban tree cover

Abstract

Many large-scale systems in nature and society are deemed to be exhibiting characteristics of self-organized criticality (SOC), a dynamical state that, among others, produces robust power-law or other heavy-tailed statistics despite not having any set of fine-tuned parameters. However, many of these systems are also affected by human activities, leading to the simultaneous action of self-organization and human intervention. In this work, we extract the geographical areas of tree-covered greeneries in a highly-urbanized setting and show the emergence of stable power-law tails in their distributions despite the large differences in the conditions of the cities considered. The result shows that while anthropogenic factors have steadily influenced the natural environment, especially in the urban setting, these systems still exhibit complex self-organization.