The damage of urban vegetation from super typhoon is associated with landscape factors: Evidence from Sentinel-2 imagery

Abstract

Many studies have investigated the impacts of typhoons on natural vegetation, but the influencing factor of urban vegetation damage from super typhoon is not clear. Therefore, this study investigated the vegetation damage patterns in eight cities affected by Typhoon Mangkhut (the 2nd strongest tropical storm worldwide in 2018) using the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) derived from Sentinel-2 images. The vegetation damage maps have an overall accuracy of 97% using the very high-resolution WorldView-3 images as reference data. The results show that (1) The typhoon-induced vegetation damage show high spatial heterogeneity in urban areas and varies with land cover types. Residential greenspace and street trees are more susceptible to typhoon disturbance than natural vegetation. (2) Wind intensity is still an important factor in urban vegetation damage (r2 = 0.43, P value <0.001). (3) Urban vegetation damage positively relates to vegetation sparseness for all cities (r: 0.39–0.89, P value <0.01), whereas negatively correlated to the height of surrounding buildings (r = −0.57, P value <0.01), suggesting that both biotic and abiotic factors of the urban environment have influences on the resistance of vegetation to storms. This study provides insights into the resistance and resilience of urban vegetation to strong typhoons that can be used for urban forestry planning and management.