Abstract:

Aims
Monitoring and quantifying the biomass and its distribution in urban trees and forests are crucial to understanding the role of vegetation in an urban environment. In this paper, an estimation method for biomass of urban forests was developed for the Shanghai metropolis, China, based on spatial analysis and a wide variety of data from field inventory and remote sensing.
Methods
An optimal regression model between forest biomass and auxiliary variables was established by stepwise regression analysis. The residual value of regression model was computed for each of the sites sampled and interpolated by Inverse-distance weighting (IDW) to predict residual errors of other sites not subjected to sampling. Forest biomass in the study area was estimated by combining the regression model based on remote sensing image data and residual errors of spatial distribution map. According to the distribution of plantations and management practices, a total of 93 sample plots were established between June 2011 and June 2012 in the Shanghai metropolis. To determine a suitable model, several spectral vegetation indices relating to forest biomass and structure such as normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), ratio vegetation index (RVI), difference vegetation index (DVI), soil-adjusted vegetation index (SAVI), and modified soil-adjusted vegetation index (MSAVI), and new images synthesized through band combinations such as the sum of TM2, TM3 and TM4 (denoted Band 234), and the sum of TM3, TM4 and TM5 (denoted Band 345) were used as alternative auxiliary parameters .
Important findings
The biomass density in urban forests of the Shanghai metropolis varied from 15 to 120 t·hm^-2. The higher densities of forest biomass concentrated mostly in the urban areas, e.g. in districts of Jing’an and Huangpu, mostly ranging from 35 to 70 t·hm^-2. Suburban localities such as the districts of Jiading and Qingpu had lower biomass densities at around 15 to 50 t·hm^-2. The biomass density of Cinnamomum camphora trees across the Shanghai metropolis varied between 20 and 110 t·hm^-2. The spatial biomass distribution of urban forests displayed a tendency of higher densities in northeastern areas and lower densities in southwestern areas. The total biomass was 3.57 million tons (Tg) for urban forests and 1.33 Tg for C. camphora trees. The overall forest biomass was also found to be distributed mostly in the suburban areas with a fraction of 93.9%, whereas the urban areas shared a fraction of only 6.1%. In terms of the areas, the suburban and urban forests accounted for 95.44% and 4.56%, respectively, of the total areas in the Shanghai metropolis. Among all the administrative districts, the Chongming county and the new district of Pudong had the highest and the second highest biomass, accounting for 20.1% and 19.18% of the total forest biomass, respectively. In contrast, the Jing’an district accounted for only 0.11% of the total forest biomass. The root-mean-square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE) and mean relative error (MRE) of the model for estimating urban forest biomass in this study were 8.39, 6.86 and 24.22%, respectively, decreasing by 57.69%, 55.43% and 64.00% compared to the original simple regression model and by 62.21%, 58.50%, 65.40% compared to the spatial analysis method. Our results indicated that a more efficient way to estimate urban forest biomass in the Shanghai metropolis might be achieved by combining spatial analysis with regression analysis. In fact, the estimated results based on the proposed model are also more comparable to the up-scaled forest inventory data at a city scale than the results obtained using regression analysis or spatial analysis alone.

Key words: biomass, Cinnamomum camphora, ETM+ image, regression analysis, residual