Sponsor
For financial assistance on this project, we are grateful to the United States Forest Service’s Urban and Community Forestry program (2011-DG-11062765-016), and the Institute for Sustainable Solutions at Portland State University.
Published In
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
8-2016
Subjects
Trees in cities -- Oregon -- Portland, Urban forestry -- Oregon - Portland, Forests and forestry
Abstract
Reducing exposure to degraded air quality is essential for building healthy cities. Although air quality and population vary at fine spatial scales, current regulatory and public health frameworks assess human exposures using county- or city-scales. We build on a spatial analysis technique, dasymetric mapping, for allocating urban populations that, together with emerging fine-scale measurements of air pollution, addresses three objectives: (1) evaluate the role of spatial scale in estimating exposure; (2) identify urban communities that are disproportionately burdened by poor air quality; and (3) estimate reduction in mobile sources of pollutants due to local tree-planting efforts using nitrogen dioxide. Our results show a maximum value of 197% difference between cadastrally-informed dasymetric system (CIDS) and standard estimations of population exposure to degraded air quality for small spatial extent analyses, and a lack of substantial difference for large spatial extent analyses. These results provide the foundation for improving policies for managing air quality, and targeting mitigation efforts to address challenges of environmental justice.
DOI
10.3390/ijerph13080790
Persistent Identifier
http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/17951
Citation Details
Shandas V, Voelkel J, Rao M, George L. (2016). Integrating High-Resolution Datasets to Target Mitigation Efforts for Improving Air Quality and Public Health in Urban Neighborhoods. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. 13(8):790.
Description
© 2016 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Originally published in International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health and can be found online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph13080790