The DOI matches its Crossref record; 78 of the 78 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
The role of urban trees in reducing land surface temperatures in European cities
Open accessAbstract
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.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Generalized Additive Models: An Introduction with R
Wood, S. N. (2017) · doi:10.1201/9781315370279 · Cited by 13,852
On the relation between NDVI, fractional vegetation cover, and leaf area index
Carlson, T. N., & Ripley, D. A. (1997) · Remote Sensing of Environment · doi:10.1016/s0034-4257(97)00104-1 · Cited by 3,125
An Ensemble Version of the E‐OBS Temperature and Precipitation Data Sets
Cornes, R. C., van der Schrier, G., van den Besselaar, E. J. M., & Jones, P. D. (2018) · Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres · doi:10.1029/2017jd028200 · Cited by 1,838
Strong contributions of local background climate to urban heat islands
Zhao, L., Lee, X., Smith, R. B., & Oleson, K. (2014) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature13462 · Cited by 1,577
Gillespie, A., Rokugawa, S., Matsunaga, T., Cothern, J. S., Hook, S., & Kahle, A. B. (1998) · IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing · doi:10.1109/36.700995 · Cited by 1,458
Magnitude of urban heat islands largely explained by climate and population
Manoli, G., Fatichi, S., Schläpfer, M., Yu, K., Crowther, T. W., Meili, N., Burlando, P., Katul, G. G., & Bou-Zeid, E. (2019) · Nature · doi:10.1038/s41586-019-1512-9 · Cited by 1,221
Christensen, J. H., & Christensen, O. B. (2007) · Climatic Change · doi:10.1007/s10584-006-9210-7 · Cited by 1,130
Zhou, W., Huang, G., & Cadenasso, M. L. (2011) · Landscape and Urban Planning · doi:10.1016/j.landurbplan.2011.03.009 · Cited by 1,042
THE GLOBAL BIOGEOGRAPHY OF ROOTS
Schenk, H. J., & Jackson, R. B. (2002) · Ecological Monographs · doi:10.1890/0012-9615(2002)072[0311:tgbor]2.0.co;2 · Cited by 1,032
Responses of tree species to heat waves and extreme heat events
TESKEY, R., WERTIN, T., BAUWERAERTS, I., AMEYE, M., MCGUIRE, M. A., & STEPPE, K. (2015) · Plant, Cell & Environment · doi:10.1111/pce.12417 · Cited by 777
Cited by
Cooling cities through urban green infrastructure: a health impact assessment of European cities
Iungman, T., Cirach, M., Marando, F., Pereira Barboza, E., Khomenko, S., Masselot, P., Quijal-Zamorano, M., Mueller, N., Gasparrini, A., Urquiza, J., et al. (2023) · The Lancet · doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(22)02585-5 · Cited by 563
Urban heat mitigation by green and blue infrastructure: Drivers, effectiveness, and future needs
Kumar, P., Debele, S. E., Khalili, S., Halios, C. H., Sahani, J., Aghamohammadi, N., Andrade, M. D. F., Athanassiadou, M., Bhui, K., Calvillo, N., et al. (2024) · The Innovation · doi:10.1016/j.xinn.2024.100588 · Cited by 270
Lin, J., Zhang, H., Chen, M., & Wang, Q. (2023) · Sustainable Cities and Society · doi:10.1016/j.scs.2023.104464 · Cited by 60
Metadata
- Authors
- Schwaab, J., Meier, R., Mussetti, G., Seneviratne, S., Bürgi, C., & Davin, E. L.
- Venue
- Nature Communications
- Published
- 2021-11-23
- Volume
- 12
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 6763-6763
- ISSN
- 2041-1723 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W3159020957
- Cited by
- 567
- References
- 78
- FWCI
- 20.91
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The role of urban trees in reducing land surface temperatures in European cities. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1038/s41467-021-26768-w
- The paper
- Schwaab, J., Meier, R., Mussetti, G., Seneviratne, S., Bürgi, C., & Davin, E. L. (2021). The role of urban trees in reducing land surface temperatures in European cities. Nature Communications. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-26768-w
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
