Ecosystem Services Provided by Urban Vegetation: A Literature Review

Abstract

WRF (Weather Research and Forecasting) and CMAQ (Community Multiscale Air Quality) models are used in very high spatial resolution (200 m) to simulate urban metabolism. Due to the high spatial resolution of the simulations, it is possible to have a detailed picture of the soil atmosphere exchange fluxes and understand the impact of different urban planning alternatives in the urban environment from a meteorological and air quality point of view. Relation between urban metabolism and urban structure can be described with information of energy, water, and pollution. There are many challenges of the sustainable urban planning with regards to the above components (for example to optimize energy efficiency of urban structure, to minimize primary water consumption, to minimize the emissions to atmosphere, reduce air pollution, etc.) This information can be extracted from meteorological and air pollution models. Meteorological fluxes (WRF/UCM) are calculated over London (UK), Athens (Greece), Gliwice (Poland), Helsinki (Finland) and Florence (Italy) and air pollution concentrations (CMAQ model) over Athens and Florence. The work was developed into the BRIDGE "Sustainable urban planning decision support accounting for urban metabolism" FP7 (Seventh Framework Programme) EU (European Union) funded project to analyze and study the impact of urban metabolism with different alternatives in urban planning scenarios. The implemented models have been run over the five European cities for full year 2008 and 2010 summer period over two domains. It was necessary to prepare different sets of input data. In general the model - when running with very high spatial resolution - produces good results although the quality in slightly reduced. Some numerical stability could be involved in the very high spatial resolution run.