Discover the desirable landscape structure for mitigating urban heat: The urban-rural gradient approach for an ancient Chinese city

《Discover the desirable landscape structure for mitigating urban heat: The urban-rural gradient approach for an ancient Chinese city》

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关键字: Land surface temperature;Urban intensity;Landscape composition and configuration;Natural cooling strategies;Urban challenges and prospects

作者单位: College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, and Key Laboratory for Earth Surface Processes of the Ministry of Education, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China;College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, and Key Laboratory for Earth Surface Processes of the Ministry of Education, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China

摘要: Urban heat is one of the most prominent challenges of urbanization. The nature of extraordinarily spatially heterogeneous landscape in cities may provide nature-based solutions to solving the urban heat problems. Here we aimed to discover the most desirable landscape structure vividly demonstrated in urban areas that we can adopt for heat mitigation. We conducted our study in Xi'an, an ancient capital of China, using land surface temperature (LST) retrieved from Landsat8, landscape features interpreted from SPOT6 along with the urban-rural gradient. We found that large LST variability (as high as 18.11 °C) existed within the same urban intensity (UI) and it is very promising to see that potential of heat mitigation broadened with increasing urbanization. This is very likely thanks to the archaic urban design of Xi'an, which incorporates and preserves the wisdom of the ancients in the urban landscape layout. We revealed two landscape composition associated desirable cooling landscape structure models (i.e., the enhancement of blue spaces and the enhancement of green spaces) generally applicable for all urban environments, and three landscape configuration related desirable cooling models, that are the complex grey infrastructure model, the aggregated green space model, and the connected and regular model of both grey and green infrastructures, which can be exquisitely adopted at low, high and intermediate urban intensity gradients.