ArticleNature communications2021
The role of urban trees in reducing land surface temperatures in European cities.
Article in Nature communications, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 46 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
46 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The influence of weather and urban environment characteristics on upper respiratory tract infections: a systematic review.Frontiers in public health · 2025Pooled it
- Urban greening strategies for mitigating heat exposure and enhancing bird diversity.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Heat requirement, not warming, governs the urban-rural disparity in spring phenology advancement.Innovation (Cambridge (Mass.)) · 2026Article
- Analyzing the spatiotemporal dynamics of land use land cover change and its effects on land surface temperature in Weyib watershed, South Eastern Ethiopia.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Using station-pair to elucidate the cooling effect of vegetation in megacities.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Transfer learning reveals large discrepancies between air and land surface temperatures in cities.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Optimizing green-adaptive green infrastructure in response to extreme climate changes: insights from a hybrid SEM-ANN method.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Trees halve urban heat island effect globally but unequal benefits only modestly mitigate climate-change warming.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Overlooked considerations in prescribing green and blue infrastructure solutions for urban environments.Innovation (Cambridge (Mass.)) · 2026Review
- Linking satellite-derived vegetation health parameters to arborist ground observations in urban environment.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The mortality impacts of implementing the 3-30-300 greenness rule and the WHO air quality guidelines in Bari, Southern Italy.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Assessing European cities with the 3-30-300 rule underscores the need for enhanced urban greening efforts.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Thermal variations and urban compactness: developing UHI indices using remote sensing.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Community Assets as Protective Factors Buffering Health Effects of Environmental Hazards: Framework and Considerations for Environmental Epidemiologists.Environmental research, health : ERH · 2026Article
- Will cities keep getting hotter? The interplay of urban expansion and greening reshapes future urban heat trajectories.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Global patterns of inequality in pedestrian shade provision.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Global urban vegetation exhibits divergent thermal effects: From cooling to warming as aridity increases.Science advances · 2026Article
- Spatiotemporal evolution of the thermal environment and influencing factors in Kashgar City's Urban Expansion.PloS one · 2026Article
- Evaluation of morpho-physiological responses to drought and salt stress in two ornamental alternatives to InvasiveFrontiers in plant science · 2026Article
- Exploring the impact of 2D/3D urban morphology on land surface temperature within the diurnal cycle in Tianjin.Scientific reports · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Urban trees influence temperatures in cities. However, their effectiveness at mitigating urban heat in different climatic contexts and in comparison to treeless urban green spaces has not yet been sufficiently explored. Here, we use high-resolution satellite land surface temperatures (LSTs) and land-cover data from 293 European cities to infer the potential of urban trees to reduce LSTs. We show that urban trees exhibit lower temperatures than urban fabric across most European cities in summer and during hot extremes. Compared to continuous urban fabric, LSTs observed for urban trees are on average 0-4 K lower in Southern European regions and 8-12 K lower in Central Europe. Treeless urban green spaces are overall less effective in reducing LSTs, and their cooling effect is approximately 2-4 times lower than the cooling induced by urban trees. By revealing continental-scale patterns in the effect of trees and treeless green spaces on urban LST our results highlight the importance of considering and further investigating the climate-dependent effectiveness of heat mitigation measures in cities.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.