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The Contribution of Trees to Increase Resilience of Urban Areas...
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The Contribution of Trees to Increase Resilience of Urban Areas to Climate Change

A special issue of Forests (ISSN 1999-4907). This special issue belongs to the section "Urban Forestry".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (20 November 2021) | Viewed by 6053

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Sandro Strumia

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Dipartimento di Scienze e Tecnologie Ambientali Biologiche e Farmaceutiche (DISTABiF), Università degli Studi della Campania Luigi Vanvitelli, Caserta, Italy
Interests: vegetation dynamics triggered by human disturbances and restoration ecology; vegetation and floristic mapping and analysis by G.I.S. tecniques; monitoring plant species and communities; biodiversity conservation and management with particular reference to rare and threatened with extinction plant species; statistical analysis of environmental data

Special Issue Information

Climate change is decreasing human wellbeing in urban areas: the rising of temperatures coupled with aridity increase the heat island effect, the extreme weather events cause floods and the stormwaters runoff increases water pollution. The number of people living in metropolitan areas has exceeded that of people in agricultural areas and this trend continues. So, in the future the climate change effects in urban areas will affect the well-being of more and more people.

Green Urban Infrastructures (GUIs) are urban environments where the built system is coupled with plants, mainly trees. GUI can mitigate the climate change effects in urban areas enhancing their resilience and improving quality of life of inhabitants. Trees play a pivot role in urban forests, gardens, parks or even as road trees, providing ecosystem services that are not simply aesthetic or recreational. Trees change microclimatic conditions decreasing overall temperature thanks to evapotranspiration and shadowing, improve air quality by removing particulate, decrease stormwater runoff thanks to root absorption.

Although trees and plants are generally the main part of GUIs, the choice of species and the design of GUIs often takes more into account aesthetic criteria than their functional role as providers of ecosystem services. In this respect more attention on both physiological and morphological features of trees should be paid to better plan GUIs able to mitigate climate change effects in urban areas.

In this special issue we invite all scientists with different skills to submit papers dealing with the contribute of trees to be used in GUIs to mitigate climate change effects in urban areas. Papers submitted in this special issue are expected to give practical information that could be used by other professional figures usually interested in GUIs such as engineers, urban planners and stakeholders to help them in their design choices.

Dr. Sandro STRUMIA
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Forests is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Green Urban Infrastructure
  • Climate change
  • Urban areas
  • Biodiversity
  • Urban forest
  • Nature-based solutions
  • Ecosystem services

Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

14 pages, 1460 KiB  
Article
Dothistroma septosporum Not Detected in Pinus sylvestris Seed Trees from Investigated Stands in Southern Poland
by Pola Wartalska, Tomasz Oszako, Sławomir Bakier, Lassaâd Belbahri, Tadeusz Malewski, Tom Hsiang, Elżbieta Popowska-Nowak and Justyna Nowakowska
Forests 2021, 12(10), 1323; https://doi.org/10.3390/f12101323 - 28 Sep 2021
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2204
Abstract
In recent years, the decline of pine stands in Europe, including Poland, has been caused by the emerging needle pathogen Dothistroma septosporum. Although this fungus appears to preferentially infect Pinus pini, P. pinaster or P. radiata in Southern Europe, it has [...] Read more.
In recent years, the decline of pine stands in Europe, including Poland, has been caused by the emerging needle pathogen Dothistroma septosporum. Although this fungus appears to preferentially infect Pinus pini, P. pinaster or P. radiata in Southern Europe, it has been reported in stands of P. nigra, P. mugo and P. sylvestris from Southern Poland. Our preliminary tests of symptomatic needles of diseased pines, including black pine (P. nigra), showed the presence of both D. septosporum and D. pini—the latter as the first report in Poland. No other endophytic pathogen, i.e., Lecanosticta acicola or Cenangium ferruginosum, were found. More extensive molecular surveying based on β-tub2 amplification of DNA in needle samples from 72 seed trees of P. sylvestris in nine different Forest Districts of Southern Poland did not find the presence of D. septosporum. Our study revealed that the seed trees from which we collected propagation material were free from the pathogen, and its endophytic behavior was not confirmed in our testing. Consequently, these investigated trees of P. sylvestris should be suitable for seed collection and propagation, following the requirements of “good” phytosanitary quality as “pathogen-free” pine seeds used for reforestation. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Contribution of Trees to Increase Resilience of Urban Areas to Climate Change)
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22 pages, 27855 KiB  
Article
Assessing the Cooling Effect of Four Urban Parks of Different Sizes in a Temperate Continental Climate Zone: Wroclaw (Poland)
by Jan Blachowski and Monika Hajnrych
Forests 2021, 12(8), 1136; https://doi.org/10.3390/f12081136 - 23 Aug 2021
Cited by 23 | Viewed by 3281
Abstract
Urban parks have been known to form park cooling islands (PCI), which can effectively alleviate the effect of urban heat islands (UHI) in cities. This paper presents results obtained for four different size parks in the city of Wroclaw, which is located in [...] Read more.
Urban parks have been known to form park cooling islands (PCI), which can effectively alleviate the effect of urban heat islands (UHI) in cities. This paper presents results obtained for four different size parks in the city of Wroclaw, which is located in a temperate continental climate. The number of publications for urban areas located in this type of climate and cities is low compared to sites in hot and humid areas. Land surface temperature (LST) maps were developed from Landsat 8 Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) data acquired during three hottest weather periods between 2017 and 2019. Metrics and spatial statistics characterising the four parks selected for the analysis based on their size were calculated. These included: perimeter, area, landscape shape index (LSI) and PLC (forest area) park metrics, and Park Cooling Area (PCA), Park Cooling Efficiency (PCE), Park Cooling Gradient (PCG), Park Cooling Island (PCI) and Extended Park Cooling Island (PCIe) spatial indexes. The averaged PCIe values ranged from 2.0 to 3.6 °C, PCI from 1.9 to 3.6 °C, PCG from 0.7 to 2.2 °C, PCE from 5.3 to 11.5, and PCA from 78.8 to 691.8 ha depending on the park. The cooling distance varied from 110 m to 925 m depending on park size, forest area and land use type in the park’s vicinity. The study provides new insight into urban park cooling effects in a medium sized city located in a temperate continental climate, and the role of parks in regulation of urban temperature to mitigate the UHI effect. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Contribution of Trees to Increase Resilience of Urban Areas to Climate Change)
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