Geo-climates and street developments shape urban tree characteristics: A street-view inventory analysis of over 200,000 trees of 11 metropolises in China

Street trees play an important role in the city, but large-scale, multi-city inventory data are very limited to date, which can help to define geo-climatic and social development influences on urban forest characteristics. In this paper we speculate that at national level, geocliamtes and street development shape the different street tree characteristics, and large scale street View images (SVIs)-measurements favor the identification of factors responsible for the street tree variations in China. By collecting urban trees from 11 metropolises through SVIs method, an inventory of urban trees in China, including 201,942 trees at 9807 sites, was obtained from a latitude gradient from tropical 18oN to cold-temperate 45oN. Individual tree size-related growth status, tree-shrub-herb-related vertical structure, tree species identity, and street condition and street development (total 20 social development parameters) in the inventory is recorded. We analyzed trends and factors influencing street trees characteristics through latitudinal variation, distribution, linear regression, redundancy (RDA) ordination, and inter-city comparisons. The results showed that 1) with latitude increased, DBH and CPS linearly decreased, together with more highly dense forests (>100 trees/100 m street segment) observed. Latitude independence was in TH and forest vertical structural complexity. 2) All tree size data were in the log-normal distribution pattern when the two-parameter model was used and was best fitted by the Johnson distribution pattern when the >2-parameter model was used. 3) Tree growth status showed strong latitude dependency (R2 > 0.4, p < 0.05), with latitude increase accompanied by a higher percentage of trees with poor growth status (diebacks, dead trees, etc.). 4) The top abundant trees were Populus spp., Cinnamomum camphora, Salix spp., Platanus acerifolia, Ficus macrocarpa (5.5 %-14.6 %), and the arbor-shrub-herb three-layer structured forests took 52.3 % of total sites. With latitude rise, increasing abundance of Populus spp., Salix spp., elm, and pine but decreasing abundance of the unrecognizable tree groups were found (p < 0.05). 5) We also constructed a street tree comprehensive index based on their potential for providing services to citizen from the inventory data and found it was negatively related to latitudes. RDA ordination showed that geo-climatic conditions (49 %-61.5 %) and social developments (21.4 %-52.7 %) were almost equally responsible for tree size, growth status, and vertical structural variations, while road width (lane number of the street) was the most potent predictor (coefficient > 2.0 %, p < 0.01) for these variations. Our study can benefit the national-level management of urban forests and inventory-based various ecological service precise evaluation.