Tree shade coverage optimization in an urban residential environment

Abstract

Shade provided by trees, shrubs and other vegetation serves as a natural umbrella to mitigate insolation absorbed by features of the urban environment, especially building structures. For a desert community, tree shade is a valuable asset, contributing to energy conservation efforts, improving home values, enabling cost savings, and promoting enhanced health and well-being. Therefore, maximizing tree shade coverage is an important component in creating an eco-friendly and sustainable urban environment. Strategic placement of trees enhances tree shade coverage of buildings. This paper details an optimization method to simultaneously maximize tree shade coverage on building facades and open structures and to minimize shade coverage on building rooftops in a 3-dimensional environment. This method integrates geographic information systems and spatial optimization approaches for placing trees that provide the greatest potential benefit to a building. A residential area in Tempe, Arizona is utilized to demonstrate the capabilities of the method. The optimization results show that two trees can provide up to 22.20 m 2 shade coverage at 12:00 across a 54 m 2 south-facing façade. This research offers a method to help homeowners, urban planners, and policy makers to quantitatively evaluate shade coverage from trees for building structures in a residential environment.

Association of urban forest landscape characteristics with biomass and soil carbon stocks in Harbin City, Northeastern China

“…These parks could benefit the local people as long as they open a window or door. Specific designs, such as demolition of illegal structures for tree planting, replanting trees in vacant lots that surround by buildings ( Bajsanski, Stojakovic & Jovanovic, 2016 ; Zhao, 2017 ; Zhao, Wentz & Murray, 2017 ), and implementation of vertical greening on roofs, walls, and bridges, may increase the connectivity of urban forests and have a positive influence on the fragmented landscape ( Gao & Yu, 2014 ). Previous studies have highlighted that urban greening practices should consider the importance of biodiversity conservation ( Xiao et al, 2016a ), removal of pollutants ( Escobedo & Nowak, 2009 ; Mu, Sun & Zhu, 2004 ), urban microclimate regulations ( Wang et al, 2018 ), urban heat island mitigation ( Zhang et al, 2017a ), and urban soil improvement ( Cui & Mu, 2016 ; Wang et al, 2017 ; Zhou et al, 2017 ).…”

Evaluation of the photovoltaic potential in built environment using spatial data captured by unmanned aerial vehicles

“…The existing EI should be maintained and the green space system at perimeter zones and woodland, farmland, nature reserves, and nature-based cultural reserves inside the city should be kept intact 24 while developing BEAPV systems, as urban plants are effective in reducing any urban heat island effects. 52,53 Offsetting the EI such as trees is to reduce the adverse impact of PV modules on growth, prevent the normal growth of EI in the built environment, and ensure the green possession. At the same time, the adverse effects of trees on the PV modules are also reduced.…”

Peer Review #1 of "Association of urban forest landscape characteristics with biomass and soil carbon stocks in Harbin City, Northeastern China (v0.3)"

“…These parks could benefit the local people as long as they open a window or door. Specific designs, such as demolition of illegal structures for tree planting, replanting trees in vacant lots that surround by buildings (Bajsanski et al, 2016;Zhao, 2017;Zhao et al, 2017), and implementation of vertical greening on roofs, walls, and bridges, may increase the connectivity of urban forests and have a positive influence on the fragmented landscape (Gao & Yu, 2014). Previous studies have highlighted that urban greening practices should consider the importance of biodiversity conservation (Xiao et al, 2016a), removal of pollutants (Escobedo & Nowak, 2009;Mu et al, 2004), urban microclimate regulations (Wang et al, 2018), urban heat island mitigation (Zhang et al, 2017a), and urban soil improvement (Cui & Mu, 2016;Wang et al, 2017;Zhou et al, 2017).…”