Urban forest and air pollutants removal: a matter of quality of life

The research deals with the understanding of the urban forest component of the green infrastructure by scaling different datasets provided by remote and on-field investigation in order to highlight the potential performance of air pollution removal by the green infrastructure itself. The case study of the city of Florence was investigated by scaling the spatial distribution of urban forests mapped by remote sensing methods. A spatial model using vegetation indices, the Leaf Area Index (LAI), re-fined by on-field LAI survey in different structural types of urban forests, and pollution concentration data was applied to estimate PM10 and O3 removal potential.