Measuring the Impact of Urban Street Trees on Air Quality and Respiratory Illness

TL;DR

This study integrates diverse open data sources to analyze how urban street trees in NYC affect air quality and respiratory health, revealing both benefits and potential health risks associated with allergenic species.

Contribution

It demonstrates a novel multi-domain data integration approach to assess urban ecology impacts, linking street tree data with health and environmental metrics.

Findings

More trees improve air quality

Allergenic species may increase asthma hospitalizations

Data integration reveals complex urban ecological effects

Abstract

New streams of data enable us to associate physical objects with rich multi-dimensional data on the urban environment. This study presents how open data integration can contribute to deeper insights into urban ecology. We analyze street trees in New York City (NYC) with cross-domain data integration methods by combining crowd-sourced tree census data - which includes geolocation, species, size, and condition of each street tree - with pollen activity and allergen severity, neighborhood demographics, and spatial-temporal data on tree condition from NYC 311 complaints. We further integrate historical data on neighborhood asthma hospitalization rates by Zip Code and in-situ air quality monitoring data (PM 2.5) to investigate how street trees impact local air quality and the prevalence of respiratory illnesses. The results indicate although the number of trees contributes to better air quality, species with severe allergens may increase local asthma hospitalization rates in vulnerable populations.