Discover the Desirable Landscape Structure of Urban Parks for Mitigating Urban Heat: A High Spatial Resolution Study Using a Forest City, Luoyang, China as a Lens

Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2023 Feb 10;20(4):3155. doi: 10.3390/ijerph20043155.

Abstract

Urban parks can mitigate the urban heat island (UHI) and effectively improve the urban microclimate. In addition, quantifying the park land surface temperature (LST) and its relationship with park characteristics is crucial for guiding park design in practical urban planning. The study's primary purpose is to investigate the relationship between LST and landscape features in different park categories based on high-resolution data. In this study, we identified the land cover types of 123 parks in Luoyang using WorldView-2 data and selected 26 landscape pattern indicators to quantify the park landscape characteristics. The result shows that the parks can alleviate UHI in most seasons, but some can increase it in winter. While the percentage of bare land, PD, and PAFRAC have a positive impact on LST, AREA_MN has a significant negative impact. However, to deal with the current urban warming trend, a compact, clustered landscape configuration is required. This study provides an understanding of the major factors affecting the mitigation of thermal effects in urban parks (UP) and establishes a practical and feasible urban park renewal method under the idea of climate adaptive design, which provides valuable inspiration for urban park planning and design.

Keywords: land surface temperature; landscape structure; luoyang; seasonal variations; stepwise regression; urban park green space.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • China
  • Cities
  • Environmental Monitoring / methods
  • Forests
  • Hot Temperature*
  • Parks, Recreational*

Grants and funding

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (52208056), the Key Technology R&D Program of Henan Province (212102310838), the Special Fund for Young Talents in Henan Agricultural University (30500930 and 30501053), and the Yunnan Applied Basic Research Projects (2019FD105).