Abstract
The cooling and humidifying effects of urban aggregated green infrastructure can provide essential services for city ecosystems, regulating microclimates or mitigating the urban heat island effect. However, the optimal thresholds of plant community structure parameters for maximizing the associated cooling and humidifying effects remain unclear. In this paper, we use the method of dummy variable regression to measure plant communities in an urban aggregated green infrastructure. By examining the relationships between the cooling and humidifying effects and plant community structure parameters (i.e., canopy density, porosity, and vegetation type), we introduce optimal thresholds for the parameters. We find that canopy density has a significantly positive correlation with both cooling and humidifying effects, while porosity has a positive correlation with cooling and a negative one with humidifying. Different vegetation types have distinct influences on cooling and humidifying effects. When the canopy density is between 0.81 and 0.85 and the porosity is between 0.31 and 0.35, the cooling and humidifying effects of the plant communities reach their peak. Additionally, the greening coverage rate and spatial types of urban aggregated green infrastructure have influences on cooling and humidifying effects. The findings can help us to better understand the relationships between plant community structure parameters and their temperature regulation functioning for urban aggregated green infrastructure. This study provides guidelines and theoretical references for the plant configuration of future urban green spaces.
Highlights
The ongoing rapid urbanization has great potential to improve human development.urbanization can lead to severe environmental problems, such as the UrbanHeat Island (UHI) effect [1]
According to the above analyses, the optimal range of canopy density was 0.81–0.85, while that of porosity was 0.31–0.35, in order to keep the cooling and humidifying effects at relatively high levels. These results demonstrate that the urban aggregated green infrastructure can facilitate cooling and humidifying effects, which may serve to alleviate the urban heat island effect
We applied mean value tables, in order to determine the optimal ranges of canopy density and porosity, providing quantitative models for an efficiency evaluation system regarding alleviating the heat island effect by means of urban aggregated green infrastructure
Summary
Heat Island (UHI) effect [1]. A progressive increase in the UHI effect has been observed in both large cities and medium-sized municipalities [2]. This phenomenon has become a widespread concern; the necessity to solve the current problem is urgent. Over the last two decades, studies focusing on mitigating UHI effects have grown steadily [3,4]. These previous studies have shown that urban green infrastructure presents an important approach to mitigate the heat island effect
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