The Effects of Street Tree's Vertical Structures on Thermal Comfort

Urban green spaces offer a variety of benefits to living things and humans. However, existing green spaces have been reduced and fragmented due to urbanization, and there is a limit to creating new large green spaces in densely developed cities. Street trees have fewer restrictions on land use, which can be a measure to secure green areas in cities. In Korea, excessive pruning is being done on some street trees for reasons such as blocking of building signboards, contact with electric wires, and restrictions on sidewalk widths. Therefore, it is necessary to quantitatively understand the relationship between the benefits provided by street trees and their structures to come up with an efficient and systematic planning and management plan for urban street trees. In this study, we quantitatively analyzed the relationship between the thermal comfort improvement by the shades of street trees and the vertical structure, planting environment, and types of street trees. To calculate the thermal comfort felt by human body, we calculated UTCI (Universal Thermal Climate Index) of each street tree. For the vertical structure of street trees, we used Terrestrial LiDAR and the point clouds of street tree's crown was sliced vertically at 1m intervals. We conducted a multiple regression analysis on the thermal comfort improvement using the variables we obtained from fields. As a result, in the case of a street tree's vertical structure, the lager the volume of tree's crown located 3-4m (β=0.298, p<.05) and 6-7m (β=0.568, p<.001) above clear length, the better the cooling effect. In addition, the thermal comfort improvement was assessed to decrease as the DBH increased (β=-0.435, p<.001). In general, the crown diameter and DBH are positively correlated, with a cooling effect occurring as crown diameter increases. In this study, the opposite result was obtained due to the small number of trees measured, so additional research is needed by increasing the number of tree samples. In the case of the planting environment, the effect of improving thermal comfort was higher in the shaded area of trees planted to the south (β=-0.541, p<.001). Since unsystematic management of street trees can deteriorate the function of them, quantitative evaluations of the vertical structure of street trees are required, which can provide specific measures for planning and management of urban street trees with thermal comfort effect.

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