The variation of air purification benefit provided by street tree
assemblages in Shenyang, China
Abstract
Street trees assemblage is a widespread natural component in the cities
and provides a wide range of ecosystem services to the cities. However,
the distribution of street trees assemblage within a city is inequal. In
this paper, we took air purification benefit provided by street trees
for example to examine how urban form, urban geography and drivers of
vegetation management affect the variation of ecosystem services
provided by street trees in metropolitan Shenyang, Northeastern China.
The i-Tree Street (2018) was utilizing to evaluate air purification
benefit provided by street trees. We analyze the results using 2
indices: per kilometer benefit (PKB) and average tree benefit (ATB). The
results showed us that (1) both indices didn’t vary along the population
gradient. (2) The PKB had a decreasing trend along the urban-suburban
gradient. (3) The districts which had the highest PKB and ATB are
neither the old ones nor the newest one, but the districts start to
develop from around 2002 and 2003. Therefore, we infer that the public
policy is a main driver of vegetation management, especially for street
trees, because street tree is closely related to road/street development
which is closely related to economic development of a region. Besides,
there could be a time lag effect for ecosystem services provided by
trees.