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Uncertainties in research between urban landscape and air quality: summary, demonstration, and expectation

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Abstract

Context

Intensive human activities induced by urban development shift the air quality of the urban area and its nearby regions. Thus, research has acknowledged that air quality is attributed to the composition of the urban landscape. The urban landscape metric has been correlated with air pollutant concentrations but has been found in different studies to have both a negative and a positive relationship. Thus, many uncertainties have arisen in such studies, making it difficult to derive optimized urban landscapes for policy implementation.

Objectives

Our research enumerates and explains the uncertainties that arise in the study of air pollution patterns in urban areas and provides a quantifiable framework for addressing them.

Methods

We conduct a review of the literature and of typical supporting cases to obtain the potential reasons for uncertainty in the findings. Then, a framework of solutions is proposed according to a quantifiable architecture for urban socioecological composite landscapes.

Results

The influencing factors of uncertainty are mainly urban natural conditions, the raw data and its expression in units for analysis in different studies, landscape and pollution metric types and spatiotemporal selection and analysis methods. The framework combining the quantifiable architecture of landscape ideas would solve this problem in both comprehensive analysis and precise analysis and ultimately lead to specific policy implementations.

Conclusions

Many uncertainties in the study of air pollution patterns in urban areas need to be prevented; hence, it is suggested that researchers consider their analytical mechanisms before conducting comprehensive analysis and then design and carry out precise analysis to draw more scientific based conclusions to support policy implementation.

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Funding

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 32071579 and 41771201). In addition, the research received financial support from the National Key Research and Development Program (Grant No. 2016YFC0503004), Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China, and the Frontier Science Research Project of Chinese Academy of Sciences (QYZDB-SSW-DQC034-2).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100085, China

    Jiaxin Li, Lijian Han, Weiqi Zhou, Weifeng Li & Yuguo Qian

  2. School of Ecology and Environmental Science, Yunnan University, Kunming, 650031, China

    Jiaxin Li & Zhiming Zhang

  3. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Lijian Han, Weiqi Zhou, Weifeng Li & Yuguo Qian

  4. Beijing Urban Ecosystem Research Station, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100085, China

    Weiqi Zhou

Authors
  1. Jiaxin Li
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  2. Lijian Han
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  3. Weiqi Zhou
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  4. Weifeng Li
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  5. Yuguo Qian
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  6. Zhiming Zhang
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Contributions

JL contributed to the analysis and review of the literatures, wrote and revised the manuscript; LH contributed to design of the research, literature review, wrote and revised the manuscript; WZ contributed to literature review and wrote the manuscript; WL, YG, and ZZ contributed to manuscript revise.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lijian Han.

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Li, J., Han, L., Zhou, W. et al. Uncertainties in research between urban landscape and air quality: summary, demonstration, and expectation. Landsc Ecol 38, 2475–2485 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-023-01744-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-023-01744-5

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