Cooling Effects and Regulating Ecosystem Services Provided by Urban Trees—Novel Analysis Approaches Using Urban Tree Cadastre Data

The provision of ecosystem services by urban trees is not yet routinely integrated in city administrations’ planting scenarios because the quantification of these services is often time-consuming and expensive. Accounting for these welfare functions can enhance life quality for city dwellers. We present innovative approaches that may appeal to the numerous city administrations that keep tree inventory or cadastre databases of all trees growing on city property for civil law liability reasons. Mining these ubiquitous data can be a feasible alternative to field surveys and improve cost–benefit ratios for ecosystem service assessment. We present methods showing how data gaps (in particular tree height and crown light exposure) in the cadastre data can be filled to estimate ecosystem services with i-Tree Eco. Furthermore, we used the i-Tree Eco output for a noval approach which focus on predicting energy reduction as a proxy for cooling benefits provided by trees. The results for the total publicly owned and managed street trees in our study site of Duisburg (Germany) show that the most important ecosystem services are the removal of particulate matter by 16% of the city emissions and the reduction of 58% of the direct and thermal radiation in the effective range of the trees in the cadastre.