Study of the Effects of Ten-Year Microclimate Regulation Based on Different Vegetation Type Combinations in a City Riparian Zone

Abstract

Ecological engineering construction is the main method for urban riparian landscape restoration. Continuous ecological environmental monitoring can reflect the effects of engineering construction and can provide a scientific basis for the improvement of engineering technology. However, the evaluation of riparian ecological engineering mainly focuses on the water environmental function and biodiversity conservation function after the construction period. Studies on the long-term evaluation of regional microclimate regulation and human settlement improvement are limited. In this paper, an ecological restoration project along the Yitong River in northern China was selected as the research object. Temperature, relative humidity and wind speed under different vegetation type combinations were monitored in the riparian ecological engineering construction during the first, second, third and tenth years. The temperature–humidity index (THI) was selected to evaluate human comfort and the improvement effect of microclimate was assessed for different vegetation type combinations. The results showed that vegetation type combinations can play a good role in regulating the microclimate and human comfort. The riparian ecological restoration project achieved a stable function for microclimate regulation in the third year. There was no significant regulation difference between tree–shrub–herb and tree–herb combinations. To realize the optimization of ecological benefits, economic benefits and social benefits, the tree–herb combination can be appropriately increased, and the tree–shrub–herb can be reduced in the application of ecological engineering. Microclimate regulation is an important achievement in engineering construction effects and can be regarded as one of the indices to evaluate the effect of ecological restoration.