Estimating the Effects of Urban Green Regions in terms of Diffusion

TL;DR

This paper presents a diffusion-based simulation method to analyze how urban green regions influence environmental factors like temperature and humidity, emphasizing the importance of spatial distribution and size of green areas.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach combining semantic segmentation and convolutional diffusion modeling to study green effects in urban environments.

Findings

Small green regions significantly contribute to diffusion effects.

Diffusion dynamics are strongly affected by spatial distribution of green areas.

Simulations on Ribeirao Preto demonstrate effective green effect diffusion.

Abstract

The interaction between cities and their respective green regions corresponds to an interesting issue that has received growing attention over the last decades. These relationships have multiple natures, ranging from providing habitat for animal life to temperature and humidity dynamics. Several methods based on area, size, shape, and distance have been considered in the literature. Given that several important contributions of green regions to urban areas involve temperature, humidity and gases (e.g.~oxygen) exchanges, which are intrinsically related to physical diffusion, it becomes particularly interesting to simulate the diffusion of green effects over urban areas as a means of better understanding the respective influences. The present work reports a related approach. Once the green regions of a given city are automatically identified by semantic segmentation and have eventual artifacts eliminated, successive convolutions are applied as a means to obtain the unfolding of the diffusion of the green effects along time. As illustrated, the diffusion dynamics is intrinsically interesting because it can be strongly affected by the spatial distribution of the green mass. In particular, we observed that smaller green regions could substantially contribute to the diffusion. The reported approach has been illustrated with respect to the Brazilian city of Ribeirao Preto, whose small and medium-sized green regions were found to complement in an effective manner the diffusion of the green effects as inferred from the performed simulations under specific parameter settings.