From Local to Micro: Exploratory Data Analysis on Urban Forests and Microclimates in Portland, Oregon, USA

Urban forests play a crucial role in mitigating urban thermal stress. Understanding and quantifying such benefits, especially through remote sensing technologies, are thus important for the more efficient management of such resources. This study examines urban vegetation's influence on the urban climate in Portland, Oregon, USA. Local city scale, coarser resolution analysis using the Local Climate Zone (LCZ) framework and spatial correlation analysis of vegetation indexes and Land Surface Temperature (LST) from mainstream 2D remote sensing products are explored. At the micro-scale, this study then employs an object-based approach using 3D Lidar point cloud data to identify and analyze individual trees. The trees are then classified based on their families and sizes to delineate tree properties. This study complements the existing urban heat stress studies by highlighting the significant impact of microscale urban trees’ properties on the effectiveness of ecosystem services. The objective of this study is thus to develop a pipeline for conducting individual-scale urban tree and microclimate analysis, which offers a flexible and scalable benchmark for future studies.