Highlights We investigated the change in visitation of urban green spaces (UGS) during COVID-19 pandemic. Social isolation reduced extent, type and distance of visited UGS on the basis of legal restrictions. Reasons for visiting UGS changed from non-essential before the pandemic to essential during it. Respondents missed visiting UGS regardless of the view of UGS from their window. Respondents expressed the need for UGS integrated within the urban fabric.

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ABSTRACT:The effects of vegetation on human thermal stress in a hot-arid region were tested in two semi-enclosed urban spaces with various combinations of mature trees, grass, overhead shading mesh and paving. The index of thermal stress was calculated hourly from measured meteorological data in the studied sites to evaluate thermal comfort in the different spaces based on radiative and convective pedestrian-environment energy exchanges and sweat efficiency, and expressed on a thermal sensation scale ranging from 'comfortable' to 'very hot'. The efficiency of water use in providing improved comfort was gauged for each of the vegetative landscaping treatments by comparing the total evapotranspiration with the reduction in thermal stress, both expressed in terms of their values in equivalent energy. While conditions in a paved, unshaded courtyard were found to be uncomfortable throughout the daytime hours (with half of these hours defined by severe discomfort), each of the landscape treatments made a clear contribution to improved thermal comfort. With shading, either by trees or mesh, discomfort was reduced in duration by over half and limited in maximum severity when the shading was placed above paving. When combined with grass, both shading mechanisms yielded comfortable conditions at all hours. In both cases, the effect of trees was more pronounced than that of the mesh, but by a small margin. With unshaded grass, 'hot' conditions in the courtyard were restricted to a short period in mid-afternoon, a considerable improvement over unshaded paving, attributable mainly to the lower radiant surface temperatures.

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Abstract. Cities impact both local climate, through urban heat islands and global climate, because they are an area of heavy greenhouse gas release into the atmosphere due to heating, air conditioning and traffic. Including more vegetation into cities is a planning strategy having possible positive impacts for both concerns. Improving vegetation representation into urban models will allow us to address more accurately these questions. This paper presents an improvement of the Town Energy Balance (TEB) urban canopy model. Vegetation is directly included inside the canyon, allowing shadowing of grass by buildings, better representation of urban canopy form and, a priori, a more accurate simulation of canyon air microclimate. The surface exchanges over vegetation are modelled with the well-known Interaction Soil Biosphere Atmosphere (ISBA) model that is integrated in the TEB's code architecture in order to account for interactions between natural and built-up covers. The design of the code makes possible to plug and use any vegetation scheme. Both versions of TEB are confronted to experimental data issued from a field campaign conducted in Israel in 2007. Two semi-enclosed courtyards arranged with bare soil or watered lawn were instrumented to evaluate the impact of landscaping strategies on microclimatic variables and evapotranspiration. For this case study, the new version of the model with integrated vegetation performs better than if vegetation is treated outside the canyon. Surface temperatures are closer to the observations, especially at night when radiative trapping is important. The integrated vegetation version simulates a more humid air inside the canyon. The microclimatic quantities (i.e., the street-level meteorological variables) are better simulated with this new version. This opens opportunities to study with better accuracy the urban microclimate, down to the micro (or canyon) scale.