執行成果摘要
Urban environmental quality influences residents'physical health and mental wellbeing. Urban forest is a green infrastructure that improves urban environmental quality and urban resilience. The benefits of a well-established urban forest include improvement of soil health, increase of biodiversity, carbon sequestration, climate change mitigation, reduction in heat island effect, improvement in permeability of the urban landscape, and provision for leisure and environmental education. Nonetheless, deteriorated urban forests compromise the benefits because of failure in management, inappropriate tree selection, and inadequate arrangement of planting. On the other hand, the benefits of urban forests are not well quantified and qualified, which results in a dispute in stakeholders. This study therefore aims to address these issues by enhancing resilience of urban forest and monitoring the environmental benefits of urban forest through four approaches: 1.We are going to establish a rapid tree selection approach based on their traits of drought tolerance. By providing empirical data of drought tolerance of native trees of low altitude forests in Taiwan to policy makers and stakeholders, they are able to conduct activities to enhance the resilience of urban forests; 2. We are going to enhance resilience of soil ecosystem service in urban area by improving soil ecosystem services; 3. We are going to provide robust information about the benefits of urban forest by scientific data and to compare the difference of microclimate and air quality between urban forests (e.g. parks) and adjacent area to express mitigation ability of urban forests. The results will justify the benefits of urban forests to policy makers and stakeholders.