Variability in BVOC emissions and air quality impacts among urban trees in Montreal and Helsinki

Abstract

Many cities attempt to mitigate poor air quality by increasing tree canopy cover. Trees can indeed capture pollutants and reduce their dispersion, but they can also negatively impact urban air quality. For example, trees emit biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) that participate in both ozone (O3) and secondary organic aerosol (SOA) formation, yet these emissions have been little studied in urban contexts. We sampled BVOCs from the leaves of mature urban trees using lightweight enclosures and adsorbent tubes in two cities: Montreal, Canada and Helsinki, Finland. In both cities, we targeted five common broadleaved species in parks and streets, comparing their standardised BVOC emission potentials to nonurban BVOC emission potential estimates from emission databases. We also calculated the potential O3 and SOA formation by the study species at the leaf scale and upscaled to the neighbourhood. We found that the measured BVOC emission potentials generally deviated little from the emission database estimates, supporting the use of database estimates for urban trees. However, tree-to-tree variation in the BVOC emission potentials was large, with slight differences between park and street trees. Compared to park trees, street tree emissions were higher in Montreal (specifically isoprene and sesquiterpenoids) and lower in Helsinki (specifically green leaf volatiles). Finally, we found that O3 formation from our study species’ BVOC emissions was dominated by isoprene, while SOA formation was also affected by lower monoterpenoid and sesquiterpenoid emissions. These findings highlight the importance of species selection and management strategies that protect trees from BVOC-inducing stresses.