Influence of Park Size and Its Surrounding Urban Landscape Patterns on the Park Cooling Effect

Urban parks, an essential component of urban green infrastructure, are known for their multiple ecosystem services to the residents in the cities. Mitigating the urban heat island (UHI) effects is one of such services. Scientific understanding on how park size and surrounding landscape pattern influence its cooling effect, however, remains poor. Using 39 parks in Shanghai, China, this paper aims to understand the relationship of land surface temperature (LST) with park size and the impacts of the surrounding landscape patterns on parks' cooling effect. The results show that the parks' LST decreased logarithmically with park size. There are nonlinear relationships between park sizes and their cooling effects. Large parks do not have advantages over small ones in the efficiency of cooling the surrounding environment. Both the class and landscape level patterns surrounding the parks influence the cooling effect. The proportion and dominance of urban land use types negatively affect park cooling effect, but enhanced shape complexity of urban land-use types could alleviate their adverse impact. However, the surrounding natural and seminatural landscape types facilitate the park cooling effect. These findings are valuable for landscape and urban planning. (C) 2014 American Society of Civil Engineers.